Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes:
> Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> writes:
> > The input functions get it, the output functions (bpcharout,
> > bpcharsend, etc) don't. Which makes it kind of hard to print a raw
> > value if you don't know how long it's going to be. They used to, but
> > that was removed some time back.
> Even back then you couldn't rely on the typmod value to be supplied;
> it was quite likely to be passed as -1. The issue is not actually
> with on-disk storage, it is with function/operator arguments and
> results. Those have never been identified any more closely than by
> giving a type OID. So for any value that came from a function,
> you won't have a typmod, and you'd better be able to find out all
> you need to know just by inspecting the value itself. Hence, length
> words.
Hm, so it could be stored on disk without the length header as long as the
length header is added to the in-memory representation? I don't think the type
system has hooks for reading and storing data to disk though.
> This is all pretty off-topic for pgsql-general, isn't it?
[moved to -hackers]
--
greg
