Insert Binary Large Object (BLOB) in PostgreSQL using libpq from remote machine

Question

Can you give an example of inserting binary data in PostgreSQL database from remote machine using libpq. My second question is: Is there any other API more efficient than libpq

Answer 1

There are 2 types of blobs in PostgreSQL — BYTEA and Large Objects. I'd recommend against using large objects as you can not join them to tables.

For BYTEA you'd use something like this in libpq:

PGresult* put_data_to_tablename(
  PGconn* conn,
  int32_t id,
  int data_size,
  const char* const data
) {
  PGresult* result;
  const uint32_t id_big_endian = htonl((uint32_t)id);
  const char* const paramValues[] = { &id_big_endian, data };
  const int nParams = sizeof(paramValues) / sizeof(paramValues[0]);
  const int paramLenghts[] = { sizeof(id_big_endian), data_size };
  const int paramFormats[] = { 1, 1 }; /* binary */
  const int resultFormat = 0; /* text */

  result = PQexecParams(
    conn,
    "insert into tablename (id, data) values ($1::integer, $2::bytea)",
    nParams,
    NULL, /* Types of parameters, unused as casts will define types */
    paramValues,
    paramLenghts,
    paramFormats,
    resultFormat
  );
  return result;
}