Re: Questions about octal vs. hex for bytea

Been using bytea heavily through JDBC.  In transitioning to 9.0 I've found the need to set the bytea_output parameter
butotherwise everything else works the same as it did before. 

As for storage space concerns I do not know for sure but the numbers cannot be that substantial to warrant changing an
existingdatabase unless large binary processing takes up a significant portion of the processing (as opposed to simple
documentstorage and retrieval which is what I am doing). 

David J.

-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org [mailto:pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of Reuven M. Lerner
Sent: Sunday, February 20, 2011 6:31 AM
To: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Subject: [GENERAL] Questions about octal vs. hex for bytea

Hi, everyone.  I've got a client who is planning to upgrade from PostgreSQL 8.3 to 9.0 in the coming weeks.  They use a
lotof tables with bytea columns.  They're worried about the switch from octal to hex formats for bytea data. 


Based on everything I know and have read, the change is only for external representations, for input and output.
Outputis now by default in hex, but can be changed with a parameter (bytea_output) that provides backward
compatibility. Input can be in either octal or hex, with no changes needed. 


My client is concerned that the internal representation has changed, and is asking me for a script that will change the
representation,in order to save space (since hex occupies less space than octal).  I'm not aware of such a need, or
eventhe possibility for this to be done; even if the internal representation has changed, it'll be handled in the
upgradeprocess, and doesn't need to be done with anything external. 


So I've told them that I don't think that anything is necessary for either input or output, except (perhaps) to set
bytea_outputin its backward-compatibility mode.  But I wanted to check with people here, just to double-check my
understanding.


Thanks in advance,


Reuven

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Reuven M. Lerner -- Web development, consulting, and training
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Skype/AIM: reuvenlerner


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