On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 11:18 AM, Janne Hellsten <jjhellst@gmail.com> wrote:
I note that postgresql-simple and mysql-simple use ByteStrings
exclusively in the API.

No, that's not how they work. The underlying representation in some places might be a ByteString, but the actual APIs don't use ByteStrings, they go through typeclasses.

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/mysql-simple/latest/doc/html/Database-MySQL-Simple-Param.html