On Thu, 2023-03-23 at 15:37 -0400, Dave Cramer wrote: > So where do we go from here ? > > I can implement using type names as well as OID's
My current thought is that you should use the protocol extension and make type names work (in addition to OIDs) at least for fully-qualified type names. I don't really like the GUC -- perhaps I could be convinced it's OK, but until we find a problem with protocol extensions, it looks like a protocol extension is the way to go here.
Well as I said if I use any external pool that shares connections with multiple clients, some of which may not know how to decode binary data then we have to have a way to set the binary format after the connection is established. I did float the idea of using the cancel key as a unique identifier that passed with the parameter would allow setting the parameter after connection establishmen.
I like Peter's idea for some kind of global identifier, but we can do that independently at a later time.
If search path works fine and we're all happy with it, we could also support unqualified type names. It feels slightly off to me to use search_path for something like that, though.
There's still the problem about the connection pools. pgbouncer could consider the binary formats to be an important parameter like the database name, where the connection pooler would not mingle connections with different settings for binary_formats. That would work, but it would be weird because if a new version of a driver adds new binary format support, it could cause worse connection pooling performance until all the other drivers also support that binary format. I'm not sure if that's a major problem or not. Another idea would be for the connection pooler to also have a binary_formats config, and it would do some checking to make sure all connecting clients understand some minimal set of binary formats, so that it could still mingle the connections. Either way, I think this is solvable by the connection pooler.
Well that means that connection poolers have to all be fixed. There are more than just pgbouncer.
Seems rather harsh that a new feature breaks a connection pooler or makes the pooler unusable.
