Message-ID: <3E703447.4080309@mascari.com>
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2003 02:33:27 -0500
From: Mike Mascari <mascarm@mascari.com>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20021212
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Hannu Krosing <hannu@tm.ee>
Cc: Barry Lind <blind@xythos.com>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Roadmap for FE/BE protocol redesign
References: <19041.1047322279@sss.pgh.pa.us> <3E6EEA9B.3050201@xythos.com>	
	<27307.1047485980@sss.pgh.pa.us>
	<1047537972.3223.23.camel@fuji.krosing.net>
In-Reply-To: <1047537972.3223.23.camel@fuji.krosing.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Hannu Krosing wrote:
> Tom Lane kirjutas K, 12.03.2003 kell 18:19:
>
>>Actually, my hope is to eliminate that business entirely by
>>standardizing the on-the-wire representation for binary data; note the
>>reference to send/receive routines in the original message.  For integer
>>data this is simple enough: network byte order will be it.  I'm not sure
>>yet what to do about float data.
> 
> 
> Use IEEE floats or just report the representation in startup packet.
> 
> the X11 protocol does this for all data, even integers - the client
> expresses a wish what it wants and the server tells it what it gets (so
> two intel boxes need not to convert to "network byte order" at both
> ends).

IIOP/CDR behaves similarly for performance reasons- "receiver 
makes it right". It also defines a representation for all of the 
CORBA idl basic types, wide characters, fixed-point types, 
structures, etc. A far-reaching, wild suggestion would be to 
replace the postmaster with a CORBA-based server process with a 
well defined interface. At a minimum, if a binary protocol is 
the ultimate destination, perhaps some of the mapping of various 
types could be borrowed from the specs.

Mike Mascari
mascarm@mascari.com