[postgis-devel] WKB type

[Paul Ramsey]

It's not like people are getting wkb slung at them by accident though... 
they have to ask for it with AsBinary, so presumably they should know 
that the bytea they are receiving is not an MP3 file but is in fact GIS 
data. The reason I like bytea as a return type for AsBinary is that all 
the other PostgreSQL infrastructure can pass it by default, and even 
have some special handling for it, whereas custom types need special 
help. If we want to pass things which are known and tagged as 
geometries, the new canonical form is a great thing, if we want a 
standardized bucket of bytes, the AsBinary function returns that as a 
bytea...

David Blasby wrote:

>>The 'WKB' postgresql datatype will no more be needed,
>>does it sound Dave ?
> 
> 
> I dont think you should take the WKB type away.  If anything, I've had
> requests to add extra support from it (so you can put it in group
> by/order by/distinct clauses).
> It also provides tagging so you can differenciate ordinary BYTEA
> binary data and WKB data.
> 
> It also means that external applications can automatically recognize
> WKB data comming towards them (instead just seeing text or bytea).
> 
> dave
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