For now, yes, plperl needs to return the text representation of bytea data. perhaps we can change that in a future release.
Storable in general is definitely not appropriate for plperl, as it does IO which is forbidden for trusted languages. I at least do not have the energy to go through every function in every standard perl module trying to decide if it is safe or not. However, in 8.0 we have provided a safe place for both trusted and untrusted plperl functions to stash objects - the %_SHARED hash. This might help with what you wanted to achieve with freeze/thaw.
cheers
andrew
Dawid Kuroczko wrote:
Hello, recently I've been trying to write a plperlu function like this: CREATE FUNCTION foo RETURNS bytea AS ' use Storable qw(freeze thaw); my @a = (1,2,3,4,5); return freeze ([EMAIL PROTECTED]); ' LANGUAGE plperlu;
In other words, serialize some data (maybe some rows, would be a great aggregate function :)) and store it in some table.
And I also wrote similar function which thaws the data from bytea argument.
PostgreSQL however seems to be doing two things: 1) when returning any data from function (including bytea return type), it copies it up to first '\0' character. Looking at the plperl.c sources, solution would be changing lines like this: result = FunctionCall3(&prodesc->result_in_func, PointerGetDatum(SvPV(*svp, PL_na)), ObjectIdGetDatum(prodesc->result_typioparam), Int32GetDatum(-1)); into something like this: size_t ret_length; /* size_t? */ (...) result = FunctionCall3(&prodesc->result_in_func, PointerGetDatum(SvPV(*svp, ret_length)), ObjectIdGetDatum(prodesc->result_typioparam), Int32GetDatum(-1));
In other words, use the fact that SvPV's second argument is used to pass string length ... but I don't know where to pass the returned length. I don't suppose (-1) is the right place...
2) When function receives bytea as an argument it converts it into \NNN-escaped string. I think it would be more natural to pass unescaped string to a perl function.
Ah, and while we are at it -- I think it could be nice to embed Storable module (functions freeze, nfreeze and thaw) into plperl -- ability to pass "raw serialized" perl data between functions, and store it in tables could be quite useful.
Regards, Dawid
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