Re: storing binary data

Use bytea. Search archives.

On Sun, 21 Oct 2001, Jason Orendorff wrote:

> Reply-To: sender
>
> Hi. I was surprised to discover today that postgres's
> character types don't support zero bytes. That is,
> Postgres isn't 8-bit clean. Why is that?
>
> More to the point, I need to store about 1k bytes per row
> of varying-length 8-bit binary data. I have a few options:
>
> + BLOBs. PostgreSQL BLOBs make me nervous. I worry about
> the BLOB not being deleted when the corresponding row in
> the table is deleted. The documentation is vague.
>
> + What I really need is a binary *short* object type.
> I have heard rumors of a legendary "bytea" type that might
> help me, but it doesn't appear to be documented anywhere,
> so I hesitate to use it.
>
> + I can base64-encode the data and store it in a "text"
> field. But postgres is a great big data-storage system;
> surely it can store binary data without resorting to
> this kind of hack.
>
> What should I do? Please help. Thanks!
>
>