"Thomas G. Lockhart" <lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu> writes:
> This isn't a definitive answer and there may be another way to discover
> array-ness but it's where I would look. Not sure if you'd be happy
> having to do a select on pg_type for every query unless you're doing it
> already...
I think that won't fly for performance reasons. I know I wouldn't want
my Tcl applications paying an additional frontend-to-backend round trip
for every SELECT result...
I was actually a tad surprised to realize that the column-type info sent
by the backend couldn't answer such a basic question as "is this an
array?". Something to fix if we ever rev the FE/BE protocol again.
Don't think I'd propose a protocol rev just for this, though.
In the meantime, I'm inclined to take the fallback approach I suggested
yesterday: provide the array-to-list reformatting function as a separate
Tcl statement that the application programmer can decide to invoke.
The app writer is likely to know perfectly well where he needs that
feature anyway.
regards, tom lane
