So Abe on Postgre won't work with default Abe config? Maybe we should do some workaround in Electrum and expect binary data there. Converting binary data to hex isn't so hard and I bet that storing binary data in database will save lot of storage space...
The default is for binary-type to be unset. I don't know what Abe does in that case. By setting "binary-type = pg-bytea", you force Abe to use Postgresql's BYTEA storage type. Setting "binary-type = hex" does the opposite and forces Abe to use hex strings instead.
The module binascii has a function hexlify that will convert buffer objects to hex strings.