Bytea vs. BLOB (what's the motivation behind the former?) - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Frank Joerdens
Subject Bytea vs. BLOB (what's the motivation behind the former?)
Date
Msg-id 20020328123321.C10687@superfly.archi-me-des.de
Whole thread Raw
List pgsql-general
Leading up to 7.2 there was quite some noise on both pgsql-general and
hackers regarding the new bytea type. It *appears* that this is now the
recommended choice for binary data over BLOBs. I didn't manage to dig up
an explanation though why bytea would be better than BLOB - besides that
the interface to deal with large objects is somewhat more convoluted.

Is this all about the cleaner interface? I also saw that bytea is a
proprietary Postgres type, a replacement(?) for the SQL99 BLOB type.
Does this mean that bytea will eventually supersede the BLOB type in
Postgres? Is bytea faster?

This probably has all been explained before somewhere but I dug through the
archives till about mid-2001 and couldn't find a clear explanation.

Regards, Frank

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