> I'd like to implement some simple data logging via triggers on a small > number of infrequently updated tables and I'm wondering if there are > some helpful functions, plugins or idioms that would serialize a row If you're familiar with perl, you can try PL/Perl. http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.2/interactive/plperl-triggers.html Here's an example (untested). If you're using quotes and colons as delimeters, you may also need to escape those in your data. CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION log_change() RETURNS trigger AS $$ my ($old_serialized, $new_serialized); foreach my $col (keys %{$_TD->{old}}) { $old_serialized .= "'" . $col ."':'" . $_TD->{old}{$col} . "',"; } foreach my $col (keys %{$_TD->{new}}) { $new_serialized .= "'" . $col ."':'" . $_TD->{new}{$col} . "',"; } my $qry = spi_prepare('insert into log_tbl values ($1,$2)', VARCHAR, VARCHAR); spi_exec_prepared($qry, $old_serialized, $new_serialized); spi_freeplan($qry); return; $$ LANGUAGE plperl; ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org/