Re: Interest in serializing composite types?

On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 5:33 PM, Darren Duncan <[email protected]>
wrote:

> On 2014-08-24, 5:33 PM, Chris Travers wrote:
>
>> Arrays are at least in theory self-contained.  We don't
>> have to ask the db how to parse them.  Tuples are not (we need to do a
>> catalog
>> lookup to find the order of elements).
>>
>
> So here's a question ...
>
> DBI has for a long time given the option for tuples to be returned either
> as arrays or as hashes.
>
> If the ability to choose representation is preserved in the improvements
> you're making, then could the extra db lookups be avoided if say the user
> choose to get their tuples as arrays instead?  The information about field
> names is lost, but then the user chose to not want them anyway, as they are
> identifying the fields by ordinal position instead.
>
> DBI defaults to returning tuples from plain SELECTs as arrays, and you
> have to ask it if you want hashes; does doing the latter mean a lookup
> already that the former doesn't have?


So suppose I have an array of tuples, each of which has an array of tuples
as a member?  Tracking the proper handling of that from the developer's
perspective may be difficult.   I would rather get text strings where I can
check whether it starts with '(' or '{'

Best wishes,
Chris Travers

>
>
> -- Darren Duncan
>
>


-- 
Best Wishes,
Chris Travers

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