Re: Exporting a PDF from a bytea column

On Thursday, February 18, 2016, John R Pierce <pierce(at)hogranch(dot)com> wrote:

> On 2/18/2016 4:44 PM, CS DBA wrote:
>
>> The system stores PDF's as large objects
>> in bytea columns.
>>
>
> Large Objects aka LO's and bytea columns are two completely different
> things.
>
>
I'll assume the "column" is the most relevant term here because the above
is true.

> Can anyone send me an example of
>> exporting from a bytea column to a PDF file?
>>
>
> I don't think you can get from a bytea field to a file without some
> coding, as SQL scripting doesn't handle binary blobs very well.
>
>
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/AANLkTi=2dARHQPRGTXmCx0aus9maHQ2SfxxbvihtuzDv@mail.gmail.com

Short answer, to avoid the binary blob problem, is to encode the binary
data, export it, then decode it.

This can be done is psql. If your client can handle binary directly (e.g,
JDBC/Java) you can use that language's facilities to perform the
binary transfer directly thus bypassing the need to transcode.

David J,