Defaulting bytea output from the backend to use hex mode encoding, which is incompatible with pre-9.0 interfaces, wasn't a friendly thing to do. The default should have been escape mode. Or else you needed a big warning in HISTORY that we must either change bytea_output, or upgrade all clients before servers. Because using a 9.0 server with a 8.x libpq-based client results in undetected data corruption when selecting BYTEA objects. By default, the 9.0 server encodes a bytea using hex mode, but an 8.x libpq-based client will decode that using escape mode, with no error detected on either end. For example, start with "A", encode to "\x40" decode to "x40". There are good reasons to break backward compatibility, like security or standards compliance, but not performance. Please think twice next time you consider breaking stuff just because you think the new way should be faster. -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
