Re: Scanning a large binary field

Kynn Jones wrote:
> I have a C program that reads a large binary file, and uses the read
> information plus some user-supplied arguments to generate an in-memory
> data structure that is used during the remainder of the program's
> execution.  I would like to adapt this code so that it gets the
> original binary data from a Pg database rather than a file.
>
> One very nice feature of the original scheme is that the reading of
> the original file was done piecemeal, so that the full content of the
> file (which is about 0.2GB) was never in memory all at once, which
> kept the program's memory footprint nice and small.
>
> Is there any way to replicate this small memory footprint if the
> program reads the binary data from a Pg DB instead of from a file?

is this binary data in any way record or table structured such that it
could be stored as multiple rows and perrhaps fields?    if not, why
would you want to put a 200MB blob of amorphous data into a relational
database?