[postgis-users] postgis support for 7.4 betas

[David Blasby]

Paul Ramsey wrote:
> Tell me again why we use the wkb type instead of piggybacking on bytea?

If you want to piggyback on bytea, then you're more than welcome to give 
your queries like:

SELECT asBinary(the_Geom)::bytea ....
or
SELECT bytea(asBinary(the_Geom)) ....

You'll notice that the bytea representation is *much* longer than the 
wkb representation.


cwb_wsa50_test=# select asbinary('POINT(0 0)');
                   asbinary
--------------------------------------------
  010100000000000000000000000000000000000000
(1 row)

cwb_wsa50_test=# select asbinary('POINT(0 0)')::bytea;
                                        asbinary 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
\001\001\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000\000
(1 row)


Also, external applications will be able to tell that what they're 
getting is WKB instead of just some arbitrary bytea.

For example, an application (say a JDBC client) will be able to tell the 
difference between these two queries:

SELECT asbinary(the_Geom) FROM geoTable;
and
SELECT '\001\001\000'::bytea FROM geoTable;


dave