Re: [HACKERS] text should be a blob field

Thomas Lockhart <lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu>

From: "Thomas G. Lockhart" <lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu>
To: Goran Thyni <goran@bildbasen.se>
Cc: Bruce Momjian <maillist@candle.pha.pa.us>, Andreas.Zeugswetter@telecom.at, pgsql-hackers@hub.org
Date: 1998-03-03T16:45:23Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
> Or simply call text-BLOBs "textblob" of something like that.
> What does SQL-92 say about BLOBs anyway?

Nothing afaik. That is why you get different meanings and usages between database
products. I'd like to keep "text" as a useful string type. Conventionally, generic
blobs are just binary objects with not much backend support (e.g. no useful
operators other than perhaps "=").

Imo generic blobs make more sense in a system without the capability to add types;
perhaps a solution for Postgres would look a little different. At the moment, the
frontend/backend protocol is different for large objects and everything else, so
it would be difficult to transparently introduce blobs which behave identically to
types which fit within a normal tuple.

                                                            - Tom