Re: bytea vs. pg_dump

Tom Lane wrote:
> Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com> writes:
>   
>> Tom Lane wrote:
>>     
>>> I'm thinking plain old pairs-of-hex-digits might be the best
>>> tradeoff if conversion speed is the criterion.
>>>       
>
>   
>> That's a lot less space-efficient than base64, though.
>>     
>
> Well, base64 could give a 33% savings, but it's significantly harder
> to encode/decode.  Also, since it has a much larger set of valid
> data characters, it would be *much* more likely to allow old-style
> formatting to be mistaken for new-style.  Unless we can think of
> a more bulletproof format selection mechanism, that could be
> an overriding consideration.
>
>             
>   

Hex will already provide some space savings over our current encoding 
method for most byteas anyway. It's not like we'd be making things less 
efficient space-wise. And in compressed archives the space difference is 
likely to dissolve to not very much, I suspect.

cheers

andrew