Re: proposal: psql \setfileref

On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 11:32 AM, Pavel Stehule <pavel(dot)stehule(at)gmail(dot)com>
wrote:

> Hi
>
> I propose a new type of psql variables - file references. The content of
> file reference is specified by referenced file. It allows simple inserting
> large data without necessity of manual escaping or using LO api.
>
> When I wrote the patch, I used parametrized queries for these data instead
> escaped strings - the code is not much bigger, and the error messages are
> much more friendly if query is not bloated by bigger content. The text mode
> is used only - when escaping is not required, then content is implicitly
> transformed to bytea. By default the content of file is bytea. When use
> requires escaping, then he enforces text escaping - because it has sense
> only for text type.
>
> postgres=# \setfileref a ~/test2.xml
> postgres=# \setfileref b ~/avatar.gif
> postgres=# insert into test values(convert_from(:a, 'latin2')::xml, :b);
> -- xml is passed as bytea
> postgres=# insert into test values(:'a', :b); -- xml is passed via unknown
> text value
>
> The content of file reference variables is not persistent in memory.
>
> Comments, notes?
>
> Regards
>
> Pavel
>
>
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>
Clearly jumping ahead on this one, but if the fileref is essentially a pipe
to "cat /path/to/file.name", is there anything stopping us from setting
pipes?
My interest is primarily in ways that COPY could use this.