D. Dante Lorenso wrote:
I know about creating a CAST from VARCHAR to BYTEA, but the problem
with a CAST is that it doesn't port to other database servers when I
do a dump and restore.
Doesn't it?
Hmm... seems to dump for me in 8.2
My CAST was defined as follows:
CREATE CAST (VARCHAR AS BYTEA) WITHOUT FUNCTION;
Tom explains why that does NOT dump and restore with my database here:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2007-11/msg00922.php
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2007-11/msg00931.php
Likely my problem is that I don't use a function to do the cast.
Ah, it seems to be.
> That forces me to manually have to recreate the cast
each time a new database is set up and usually that's the step that
gets forgotten.
Surely you have a script that creates your databases for you?
Is this enough script?:
DUMP:
/usr/bin/pg_dump -U [user] -Ft [dbname] > [tar_file]
RESTORE:
/usr/bin/pg_restore -c -Ft [tar_file] | /usr/bin/psql -U [user] [dbname]
Oh, you said new databases, by which I assumed you meant empty. Oh, if
you're dumping/restoring try -Fc - it's a lot more flexible if you want
to do partial restores etc.
Is there a function that will do what I want to convert the datatype
without having to create a CAST that PostgreSQL doesn't have
natively? How else are you supposed to use the ENCRYPT and DECRYPT
functions?
With actual bytea types?
Sure, bytea works, but I want this to work:
SELECT DECRYPT(ENCRYPT('cheese', 'secret', 'bf'), 'secret', 'bf');
I don't see any BYTEA in there ...
Well that's your problem - decrypt/encrypt operate on streams of bytes,
not characters. The reason being (presumably) that various
accents/symbols will have differing byte-codes in different encodings.
This means you'll need to be careful if you move between LATIN1 and
UTF-8 (for example) and you have passwords with odd characters.
Anyway this will convert for you
Perfect. And now that this CAST depends on a function which is in my
database, it should dump and restore without a problem.
Let me go test all this ... YEP THAT WORKS!
Great. If you find speed to be a problem you might want to look at
coding up a C function to do it. Shouldn't be difficult, since it
doesn't need to do anything to the data.
--
Richard Huxton
Archonet Ltd
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