On Fri, 2 Dec 2005, Luke Lonergan wrote:
And how do we compose the binary data on the client? Do we trust that the client encoding conversion logic is identical to the backend's? If there is a difference, what happens if the same file loaded from different client machines has different results? Key conflicts when loading a restore from one machine and not from another? - Luke
the same way you deal with text data that could be in different encodings, you tag your message with the format version you are useing and throw an error if you get a format you don't understand how to deal with.
if a client claims to be useing one format, but is instead doing something different you will be in deep trouble anyway.
remember, we aren't talking about random application code here, we are talking about postgres client code and libraries, if the library is incorrect then it's a bug, parsing bugs could happen in the server as welll. (in fact, the server could parse things to the intermediate format and then convert them, this sounds expensive, but given the high clock multipliers in use, it may not end up being measurable)
David Lang
