First - this is a tremendous coup, Dan. I'm extremely impressed.
The fact that you got JDBC working with Postgres is a minor coup in itself, as the PG hacker's group gets a steady trickle of pleas for help from folks trying to do this.
JNI-in-module seems like the best way to go, by far. It would be a valuable contribution to AOLserver, too, I'm sure other folks would want it.
A question about BLOBs. Are you doing an emulation hack like I did or using built-in LOs? The built-ins aren't a viable solution as they can't be dumped, and secondarily because they make two files for each LO in your database directory. Moving the hack I did for the driver into Java would be easy, and of course the SQL's already defined, you'd just use the same table the driver uses.
It looks like real large objects are going to be in PG 7.1 for sure. Jan Wieck (who also did PL/pgSQL and referential integrity) has already committed his first cut to the PG development CVS tree. He's doing a CLOB type at the moment in order to test the SQL and internal routines (it actually works a bit like my driver hack), so it can be tested without folks having to wait for him to hook it up to built-in types.
If he or someone else doesn't write character-encoded I/O for large byte arrays, I'll add it in, to make this built-in type pg_dumpable.
At that point we can drop my driver kludge and anything you come up with for Java.
The point is simply that you can view any solution you come up with as being strictly a short-term thing, just like my driver hack.
