Shachar Shemesh wrote:
Even the original sentence does not describe the problem we're seeing
here. It does not mention cross platform incompatibility.
That's why I suggested it should be improved.
The COPY docs are probably more correct: "The BINARY key word causes all
data to be stored/read as binary format rather than as text. It is
somewhat faster than the normal text mode, but a binary-format file is
less portable across machine architectures and PostgreSQL versions."
Again, to me this sentence spells "you have a problem, we're not going
to help you out, deal with it".
Eh? It spells out what we provide and what the limitations are. You
could put that spin on every documented limitation, if you were so inclined.
This is especially true if what Tom said
was true, that the text format does not maintain total precision. You
are essentially telling the user "you cannot move your data reliably
even between servers of the same version".
Since this is the exact mechanism used by pg_dump, we would surely have
been long since deafened by complaints if this were a problem of any
significance.
cheers
andrew
---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to
choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not
match
