Put the following [Gist](https://gist.github.com/eaigner/5004468) in a `main.go` and run it (with the correct credentials set) against 1. A local install of Postgres 9.2.2 using the [Postgres.app](http://postgresapp.com/) with `ssmode=disable` 2. A free heroku Postgres 9.1.6 [Dev instance](https://postgres.heroku.com) with `ssmode=require` version 1 will return rows in both cases, version 2 only for the table without the `bytea` field.