Re: protocol change in 7.4

Christof Petig wrote:
> Neil Conway wrote:
> 
>>         (6) Protocol-level support for prepared queries, in order to
>>             bypass the parser (and maybe be more compatible with the
>>             implementation of prepared queries in other databases).
> 
> 
> Let me add
>   (6b)    Protocol level support for query parameters. This would actually
>     make (6) more powerful and speed up non prepared (but similar)
>     queries via the query cache (which is already there IIRC).
>     [I talk about   <statement> USING :var ... ]
> 
>   (n)    Platform independant binary representation of parameters and
>     results (like in CORBA). This can _really_ speed up
>     communication with compiled programs if you take the time to
>     implement it. This was previously planned for a future
>     CORBA fe/be protocol, but this does not seem to come any time
>     soon.

After one night's sleep I think that perhaps a CORBA based protocol 
might be less work (but I have no idea about a decent authentification 
schema, I'd tend to reuse the already authentificated stream). A 
corbaized query-only interface might easily cover these issues and be 
less work than a full corba backend access. JDBC (I don't know much 
about it) might give a reasonable interface design (perhaps combined 
with a libpq[++|xx] like interface if there's benefit to it).

>  (n+1)    Optional additional Result qualifiers. E.g. dynamic embedded
>     sql has a
>     flag to indicate that this column is a key. Previously it was
>     impossible to set this flag to a meaningful value. Also
>     the standard has additional statistical information about the
>     size of the column etc. If it's unclear what I'm talking about
>     I will look up the exact location in the standard (it's embedded
>     sql, dynamic sql, get descriptor)

This does not need an implementation soon. But the new protocol should 
allow future things like this.

All these proposals are motivated by (future) ecpg [C/C++] needs. So 
IMHO the ODBC, JDBC, libpqxx people might be interested in many of these 
issues, too. We definitely should make sure to have asked them.

Yours   Christof