Hi, I'm the one who asked :)
Ron Johnson wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 18, 2026 at 9:58 AM hubert depesz lubaczewski <depesz(at)depesz(dot)com>
> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> > So, we have various sha* functions.
> >
> > And I recently got asked about using them as a based for unique index
> > over long texts.
> > Normally one would do it with md5(text), but the person asking wanted to
> > use sha().
>
> I think I'd push back, asking them if they really need
> cryptographically-secure hashing (which they most probably don't).
I indeed don't need cryptographically-secure hashing in this
scenario, and I will be using md5.
Nevertheless, I think using md5 in any context that isn't "to verify
digests produced in the past" is a poor decision, and postgres should
make using other hashes just as easy!
The specific context of hashing aside, it seems weird to me that:
- there is a byte-array representation of text columns, which appears to
be independent of database encoding
- there doesn't seem to be _any_ sane way to access this.
The obvious (to a naive user, like I was) approach, casting to bytea,
has exceptionally surprising behaviour: for many text strings, it does
exactly what the naive user might hope for, giving back the UTF-8
representation. But multiple distinct text strings, like '\033' and
'\x1b', convert to the same byte string! And text strings containing a
backslash that doesn't fit the bytea hex format or the bytea escape
format will fail to convert completely!
The fact that convert_to() is only stable and not immutable makes sense
to me given the effect that configuration can have on its behaviour, but
given that there does appear to be a trivially-accessible UTF-8
representation (as used by md5()) I think there should be an immutable
function that provides access to it? Is there a good reason not to? I'd
be willing to send a patch for it myself.
Linus
