Re: COPY support in pgsql-jdbc driver

Barry Lind writes: 

> Sam Varshavchik wrote: 
>
> > What's being dumped and reloaded here is a byte-stream 
> > (InputStream/OutputStream), not a character-stream (Reader/Writer).  
> > Presumably, the only thing that's ever going to be reloaded something 
> > that was dumped previously, so no conversions are necessary.
>
> This is not correct.  The data coming from the server is a stream of 
> characters in the character encoding of the server.  This character 
> encoding may be different than the client character encoding, and 
> therefore character set conversions are necessary.  Lets say for example 
> the database is running with UTF-8 as it's character set, thus the output 
> of the copy will be UTF-8 encoded.  If the client is running Latin1 then 
> there will be a missmatch and all 8bit characters will be interpreted 
> incorrectly by the client.  Character set conversion is necessary in this 
> case.

That only matters if you actually want to do something with the dumped data. 
If all you want is to be able to reload it later, why bother converting 
charset A to B, only to have it converted from B to A later? 

--
Sam 


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