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by rlupi 551 days ago
In other words, considering we are talking about string and unicode...

There are two types of programmers, those that are wrong and those that are very wrong

1 comments

lol. :)

Funny but not entirely true. I had cases when we had to urgently store a firehose of data and figure out the right string encoding later. Just dumping the strings with uncertain encoding in `bytea` columns helped us there.

Plus for some fields it helps with auditability f.ex. when you get raw binary-encoded telemetry from devices in the field, you should store their raw payloads _and_ the parsed data structures that you got from them. Being this paranoid has saved my neck a few times.

The secret is to accept you are not without fault and take measures to be able to correct yourself in the future.

Indeed, one system I dealt with used char instead of blob. The text as stored was riddled with U+FFFE (unicode unknown character).