Re: function attributes

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 5:27 PM, Andrew Dunstan
<andrew.dunstan@pgexperts.com> wrote:
> Yesterday I did a bit of work on allowing bytea values to be passed into and
> out of plperl in binary format, effectively removing the need to escape and
> de-escape them. (The work can be seen on he plperlargs branch of my
> development repo at
> <https://github.com/adunstan/postgresql-dev/commits/plperlargs/>).
>
> At the moment the behaviour is triggered by a custom setting
> (plperl.pass_binary_bytea), but this isn't really satisfactory. We could
> turn it on  permanently, but that would break a lot of legacy code. What we
> really need is a way of marking a function with some attributes. Of course,
> we could put it in the program text like plpgsql's #variable_conflict, but
> that's really rather ugly. The grammar already has an attribute mechanism
> for functions, and ISTM we just need to extend that a bit to allow setting
> of function attributes reasonably flexibly, much as we can now specify
> format options on EXPLAIN or we'll soon be able to specify options for
> foreign tables.
>
> Thoughts?

Well, you could set that GUC (plperl.pass_binary_bytea) on a function
without changing any syntax on at all.

CREATE FUNCTION name (args) ... SET plperl.pass_binary_bytea = true;

--
Robert Haas
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