> So, for me, RAW is the right solution, or at least *a* right solution.
Questions on how to extract from a bytea column come up on a regular basis, as in [1] [2] [3], or [4] a few days ago, and so far the answers are to encode the contents in text and decode them in an additional step, or use COPY BINARY and filter out the headers.
But none of this is as straightforward and efficient as the proposed COPY RAW. Also the conversion to text can't be used at all on very large contents (>512MB), as mentioned in another recent thread [5] (this is the same reason why pg_dump can't dump such rows), but COPY RAW doesn't have this limitation.
Technically COPY BINARY should be sufficient, but it seems that people dislike having to deal with its headers.
Also it's not supported by any of the drivers of popular script languages that otherwise provide COPY in text format (DBD::Pg, php, psycopg2...) Maybe the RAW format would have a better chance to get support there, because of its simplicity.
exactly - I would to decrease dependency on PostgreSQL internals. Working with clean content is simple and possible with any environment without unclean operations.