Re: [HACKERS] Binary cursors, numerics and other types

> There has been some talk of creating a CORBA interface to Postgres,
> which would make use of binary representations for the basic data types
> safer, since I believe CORBA offers facilities for cross-platform
> transfer of binary integers (floats too? not sure).  But I don't think
> that would extend to nonstandard Postgres datatypes.

All Postgres data types could be described easily using Corba
constructs. And all of those types would then have complete binary
compatibility across platforms. There are also facilities to
dynamically map declarations from clients to servers and vica versa,
though one takes a performance hit to do so.

We've been using Corba (the ACE/TAO toolset) to build realtime systems
at work. We're just getting far enough to start deploying some testbed
systems in a month or two. And in a lot of ways Corba is really great.
One thing to worry about is that afaik there is no single ORB which
supports as many platforms as we do. So we'd have to support multiple
ORBS to get at all of our targets, which will be a royal pain.
                     - Thomas

-- 
Thomas Lockhart                lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu
South Pasadena, California