Thread: large objects in 7.3

I have a few questions about “large objects” in postreSQL 7.3 .

I see from the documentation that

(1) there is a table name pg_largeobject that seems to be the place where large objects are stored.

(2) Likewise there are psql commands (lo_list, lo_import, lo_export, lo_unlink) … lo_list seems to work,

  but the others require some parameters, the format of which is not documented)

(2) there is an example where server side built-in functions are used to apparently do 2 things

            (a) import a large object into pg_largeobject, and assign it an loid

            (b) and then insert that loid into the oid column in table “image”

CREATE TABLE image (

     name            text,

     raster          oid

 );

 INSERT INTO image (name, raster)

     VALUES ('beautiful image', lo_import('/etc/motd'));

 SELECT lo_export(image.raster, '/tmp/motd') FROM image

     WHERE name = 'beautiful image';

One question is …

            is this actually what’s going on (can’t find any other documentation) ?

another question is … how does one use \lo_import in psql?

and finally

            the test program does not run on a remote database. Is there any way to manipulate large objects

(import, export, read, write, etc.) on a remote database?

Thanks,

Dick Wieland

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