Re: storing C binary array in bytea via libpq - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Tom Lane
Subject Re: storing C binary array in bytea via libpq
Date
Msg-id 22209.1481048330@sss.pgh.pa.us
Whole thread Raw
In response to storing C binary array in bytea via libpq  (Tom DalPozzo <t.dalpozzo@gmail.com>)
List pgsql-general
Tom DalPozzo <t.dalpozzo@gmail.com> writes:
> I've a table in which a field is BYTEA, as I need to store around 200 raw
> bytes in this field.
> I need to perform many many INSERT  starting from a common C array  and, in
> order to get good performance, I want to do many of them in a single BEGIN
> COMMIT block.
> What is the best choice from libpq?
> PQexec needs to have the bytes encoded into a string. This expansion lowers
>  the performance (I tried with \x format, not with the other option yet).
> With PQexecParams, can I send a raw array of bytes as a bytea parameter?

Sure.  Specify binary format for that parameter.

> And also, as PQexecParams can't accept multi commands, if I enclose many
> PQexecParams calls between a PQexec("BEGIN;")  and PQexec("COMMIT") would
> it work as I wish?

Well, it'll be faster than committing them separately, but have you
considered bundling this up into a single INSERT with multiple VALUES
rows?  It'd be a bit tedious to manage by hand, but if the command is
being constructed by a program anyway, it shouldn't be much harder
than separate INSERTs.  Much of the time in this is going to go into
parsing and network round-trip overhead, so one statement is going
to handily beat N statements whether they're in a transaction block
or not.

            regards, tom lane


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