On PostgreSQL, column type bytea has improper rendering

[krpors]

On PostgreSQL (maybe also other RDBMS?), the blob type bytea is rendered using the hashcode of the value in the table view. For example, this table definition:

is rendered as follows:

Ideally this would be rendered differently. Probably depends on size of the content (don't want to render 500 megabytes of data, for instance).

[aadrian]

@krpors The hash is useful, in order to see right away if it's the same content or something different.

Maybe a tooltip or popover for that cell type with a selectable viewer would be helpful.

Many DB tools do this - and default it to a HexViewer, with different Image Viewers (jpg/png) as alternative option.
For bigger contents, there's also "save cell to file" to be able to open it with the right tool.

[krpors]

I have been thinking about some kind of a hex viewer as well. There is a small but to this blob thing though: The query executed can result in a lot of results, returning many blobs. The complete result could be 54 Kb, or orders of magnitude higher. I'm not sure how the application will handle that.

Let's say a resultset returns 3 records, each record has a blob type, and each of its contents are +500 MB, heapsize of the application is limited to 512 Mb. What happens then? I haven't tested this yet :)

In any case, a hex viewer for a blob/bytea type would be nice I suppose. And saving individual cell contents would be helpful as well.