A large majority of the callers of pg_do_encoding_conversion were
specifying the database encoding as either source or target of the
conversion, meaning that we can use the less general functions
pg_any_to_server/pg_server_to_any instead.
The main advantage of using the latter functions is that they can make use
of a cached conversion-function lookup in the common case that the other
encoding is the current client_encoding. It's notationally cleaner too in
most cases, not least because of the historical artifact that the latter
functions use "char *" rather than "unsigned char *" in their APIs.
Note that pg_any_to_server will apply an encoding verification step in
some cases where pg_do_encoding_conversion would have just done nothing.
This seems to me to be a good idea at most of these call sites, though
it partially negates the performance benefit.
Per discussion of bug #9210.
The PostgreSQL contrib tree
---------------------------
This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and plug-in
features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system, mainly
because they address a limited audience or are too experimental to be
part of the main source tree. This does not preclude their
usefulness.
User documentation for each module appears in the main SGML
documentation.
When building from the source distribution, these modules are not
built automatically, unless you build the "world" target. You can
also build and install them all by running "make all" and "make
install" in this directory; or to build and install just one selected
module, do the same in that module's subdirectory.
Some directories supply new user-defined functions, operators, or
types. To make use of one of these modules, after you have installed
the code you need to register the new SQL objects in the database
system by executing a CREATE EXTENSION command. In a fresh database,
you can simply do
CREATE EXTENSION module_name;
See the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about this
procedure.
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