[postgis-devel] Canonical binary form AND WKB

[Markus Schaber]

Hi, Strk,

On Mon, 20 Dec 2004 16:15:34 +0100
strk at refractions.net wrote:

> If we made the canonical form == internal form we'll have
> many troubles when willing to change internal form and 
> accept restores from 'old' dumps.

You're right. This would be a point where internal form and canonical
form would be forced to fork.

> Also, needs of internal storage are different from needs
> of data exchange. For internal storage we want a representation
> which is performant and small in size. For exchange we want
> a representation which is stable, essencial and portable.

Yes, I thought to short. I had simplicity of current code in mind,
instead of extensibility.

So using an thoughtful designed EWKB as canonical format will allow us
to keep the format for the next few generations.

But I still vote for canonical text to be hex(canonical binary) instead
of "SRID=42;"+hex(canonical binary without srid). Having the SRID in
plain text does not help anything as the actual data is still not human
readable, and it complicates parsing and generation of canonical text
format.

Maybe I can do some code experiments about this, but not before the
second week in Jan.

Markus
-- 
markus schaber | dipl. informatiker
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