Thread: Re: How do I pack a class into a string? Is serialize available?

On 28 Aug 2001, Doug McNaught wrote:

> "Gurunandan R. Bhat" <grbhat@exocore.com> writes:
>
> >     Is a postgres function to pack an entire row from a table into a
> > string available? I want something analogous to "serialize()" in php.

[expl. snipped]
>
> What problem are you trying to solve?

I wanted to write a small utility to keep two databases synchronised.
Whenever I add a row to a table in the local database, I intend to put a
trigger that would update a special table with the modified tablename and
the serialised version of the new row. I then copy this single table
across and rebuild my remote database.

And advice?

Thanks and regards,

Gurunandan

"Gurunandan R. Bhat" <grbhat@exocore.com> writes:

> On 28 Aug 2001, Doug McNaught wrote:
>
> > What problem are you trying to solve?
>
> I wanted to write a small utility to keep two databases synchronised.
> Whenever I add a row to a table in the local database, I intend to put a
> trigger that would update a special table with the modified tablename and
> the serialised version of the new row. I then copy this single table
> across and rebuild my remote database.
>
> And advice?

Well, you could certainly write a set of per-table serialization
functions, and attach each one to its table via a trigger.  It might
actually be possible to write a generel serialization function in C if
not in one of the other languages.

What you need to do is come up with a serialization format, perhaps
stealing one (from PHP?).  ;)  Serialization is basically a matter of
escaping and delimiting data; how you do it depends on what kind of
data you have and how it's put together.

Does this help?

-Doug
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