Drivers

PostgreSQL's frontend/backend protocol allows column data to be encoded using two formats: Text or Binary.

Text is the most commonly used. It's the only option available for the simple query protocol and is often the default value for the extended query protocol (ie prepared statements, see DECLARE). COPY and logical replication also uses this format by default to exchange column data. The TCE extension will work seamlessly in that situation.

The Binary format is more efficient because it avoids the overhead of text serialization/deserialization (e.g., parsing "2024-01-15" as a date string vs. receiving raw bytes directly).

The TCE extension will not work out-of-box with drivers using the binary protocol. For that, you need to enable the tce.autocast parameter

ALTER DATABASE foo SET tce.autocast TO TRUE;

Here's a comprehensive list of the most commons drivers available and which protocol they implement:

opt-in means the driver defaults to the text protocol, but you can explicitly request binary mode in your code. For example with psycopg3:

cursor.execute("SELECT ...", binary=True)