On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 8:02 AM, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> wrote:
>
>
> Merlin Moncure wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 4:14 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com> writes:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Tom Lane wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm thinking plain old pairs-of-hex-digits might be the best
>>>>> tradeoff if conversion speed is the criterion.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> That's a lot less space-efficient than base64, though.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Well, base64 could give a 33% savings, but it's significantly harder
>>> to encode/decode. Also, since it has a much larger set of valid
>>> data characters, it would be *much* more likely to allow old-style
>>> formatting to be mistaken for new-style. Unless we can think of
>>> a more bulletproof format selection mechanism, that could be
>>> an overriding consideration.
>>>
>>
>> another nit with base64 is that properly encoded data requires
>> newlines according to the standard.
>>
>
> er, no, not as I read rfc 3548 s 2.1.
PostgreSQL (sort of) follows RFC 2045, not RFC 3548. I don't think it
would be a good idea to introduce a second method of encoding base64.
merlin
