Re: large objects and printable docs

On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, Steve Waldman wrote:

> I've got a few rather illiterate questions; I'd be grateful if anyone
> would take the time to answer them.

Hey, I'm almost as illiterate as you, vis a vis PostgreSQL.

> 1) Is there anywhere where postscript or pdf renderings of the docs can
> be downloaded on-line? I'd prefer to just download and print these
> rather than having to set up a whole bunch of sgml tools.

If you visit the website, under
 Info Central
  Documentation
   Published Book
you will see a link to downloading a PDF of the book, which as of about a
week ago, is still being written.  I haven't checked lately.

> 2) From what I can tell, all of the standard types in Postgres max out
> at than 8k,

Sort of.  I believe this is a tuple (or row) limit.  If you have 8
text or varchar types in a tuple, on average they are limited to
about 1k each.  Or this is how I interpret the docs.  I haven't
tried pushing it.

>          but there is some sort of large object support. Large object
> support seems to be documented only in the programmer's guide; there is
> no mention of these in the data types section of the users' guide.

There is some mention in the book, and a handful of examples
in the various guides and in archives at DejaNews.

A large object is sort of an anonymous thing.  You can tell that
something was stored, but unless you write/export the data back
into user space, you can't do anything with it.

> Looking at examples from the programmers guide, it looks as though there
> is a non-standard SQL data type called oid,

I don't think it is quite so much that OID is non-standard, I
think every dbase which is capable of handling large objects
has something analagous to oid.  It is a pointer to storage
if you think C.

>                                            some support for working
> with these in SQL directly, but much more support for working with them
> through interface APIs. Does postgres 7 have any support for SQL3
> blob/clob datatypes (stored in SQL as such)?

This I don't know.  My perl stuff which was inputting large objects
wasn't written for 7.  I don't know how things have changed.

Gord

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