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> The only functions here all take a filesystem path

From the documentation:

> Creating a pdf type, by casting either text path or bytea blob.

With the example: SELECT ''::bytea::pdf;

So it's convenient to use the path to test quickly, but you can use anything in PostgreSQL which return (or can be convert) a bytea

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So potentially there’s a full text search case (?) for doing this but I’d always just default to adding documents like this to elastic search instead. I just cannot see a good use case for this and lots of bad ones.

It's probably mainly aimed at data pipeline use cases. It's common to have stages of very "messy" data that you'll want to clean up. This lets you keep that part of it all in Postgres, if you like, if your messy data is PDFs, which is a fairly common case.

Not every object in a database needs to be ready for public consumption. Some of it's there for processing, for certain use cases.

The first iteration of this was actually FTS only https://tselai.com/full-text-search-pdf-postgres

In the second pass I made `pdf` a type.

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