Re: protocol change in 7.4

>There has been some previous discussion of changing the FE/BE protocol
>in 7.4, in order to fix several problems. I think this is worth doing:
>if we can resolve all these issues in a single release, it will lessen
>the upgrade difficulties for users.

Here are a couple of other changes you might consider (maybe these changes 
already exist and I just don't know about them):

a)  Make much of the metadata sent to the client optional.  When I execute 
20 fetches against the same cursor, I don't need the same metadata 20 
times.  For narrow result sets, the metadata can easily double or triple 
the number of bytes sent across the net.  It looks like the protocol needs 
the field count, but everything else seems to be sent for the convenience 
of the client application.

b)  Send a decoded version of atttypmod - specifically, decode the 
precision and scale for numeric types.