Have you ever tried to output a file stored in a bytea column from PostgreSQL using PSQL? It ain't pretty. Andrew Dunstan has a couple of examples of doing this in his article Clever Trick Challenge. This issue has now become very relevant for PostGIS raster use. The reason being is that now that PostGIS in it's 2.0 encarnation can do clipping of rasters, unions of rasters, map algebra, convert geometries to rasters and convert those rasters to various imagery type file formats, people naturally assume it should be trivial to output your new fangled raster query as a jpeg or png etc via, PSQL. Turns out it is not. For those who need to, I've documented an example using one suggestion from Andrew's blog which utilizes the Large object support built into PostgreSQL. It would be nice if this were simpler. I chose this approach because it was the only one that didn't assume a user has Perl installed or is on a Unix system so should work fairly much the same regardless the client OS in use. You can find the example in Outputting Rasters with PSQL. Suggestions on how to improve on this are welcome.