Andreas Pflug <pgadmin@pse-consulting.de> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> There wasn't any obvious bang for the buck in rewriting it.
> Well a non-binary copy could take as much as 5 times as much as a binary
> copy. I hit this when COPYing 1.5GB of data, getting a 6.6GB file. This
> made the 100MBit LAN connection a bottleneck.
Or vice versa --- the binary format is *not* necessarily smaller than text.
As an example, an integer column that contains only small values (say 1
or 2 digits) will need 8 bytes as binary and only 2 or 3 as text.
Fixing psql to handle binary copy isn't an unreasonable thing to do,
but I can't get real excited about it either ...
regards, tom lane