[postgis-users] Re: Proposed SQL interface for PGRaster

[Patrick]

"Mark Cave-Ayland" <mark.cave-ayland at ilande.co.uk> wrote in message 
news:1165342516.14311.26.camel at mca-desktop...
>
> Thanks for an interesting proposal. My only comment so far would concern
> the endian-ness of the raster data if it is stored as binary - for
> example, what would happen in the case of dumping a PostgreSQL database
> containing pgrasters on an Intel machine and restoring it on a Power
> machine with respect to the int16/32/64 and float32/float64 types?
> Perhaps you need to store the endian-ness of the data as it is inserted
> into the database, and then perform optional on-the-fly conversion
> depending upon the current processor?
>
Hi Mark,

Endianness of the data is of no concern on the DB side. It only becomes an 
issue on the application side. I would suggest to leave the storage layout 
up to the application creating the raster and have an attribute indicating 
the endianness. This implies that the application will have to do any 
required conversion, but I expect many data-user applications to be on the 
same platform as data-producer applications.

Cheers,
Patrick