Re: Database restore speed

Stephen,

On 12/2/05 1:19 PM, "Stephen Frost" <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
>
>> I've used the binary mode stuff before, sure, Postgres may have to
>> convert some things but I have a hard time believing it'd be more
>> expensive to do a network_encoding -> host_encoding (or toasting, or
>> whatever) than to do the ascii -> binary change.
>
> From a performance standpoint no argument, although you're betting that you
> can do parsing / conversion faster than the COPY core in the backend can (I
> know *we* can :-). It's a matter of safety and generality - in general you
> can't be sure that client machines / OS'es will render the same conversions
> that the backend does in all cases IMO.

One more thing - this is really about the lack of a cross-platform binary
input standard for Postgres IMO. If there were such a thing, it *would* be
safe to do this. The current Binary spec is not cross-platform AFAICS, it
embeds native representations of the DATUMs, and does not specify a
universal binary representation of same.

For instance - when representing a float, is it an IEEE 32-bit floating
point number in little endian byte ordering? Or is it IEEE 64-bit? With
libpq, we could do something like an XDR implementation, but the machinery
isn't there AFAICS.

- Luke