Re: Reducing the overhead of NUMERIC data - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Jim C. Nasby
Subject Re: Reducing the overhead of NUMERIC data
Date
Msg-id 20051104211818.GZ9989@pervasive.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Reducing the overhead of NUMERIC data  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
Responses Re: Reducing the overhead of NUMERIC data  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
List pgsql-hackers
On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 10:32:03AM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> I'd feel a lot happier about this if we could keep the dynamic range
> up to, say, 10^512 so that it's still true that NUMERIC can be a
> universal parse-time representation.  That would also make it even
> more unlikely that anyone would complain about loss of functionality.

Would it be feasable to have a type that satisfies that constraint but
isn't generally intended for on-disk use? My thought is that this new
type would be used mostly for casting purposes. Kind of like the
UNKNOWNNUMBER but easier to do since it'd just be another type. (BTW,
I'm not suggesting that we disallow un-disk storage of the type, only
discourage it unless someone really, really needs an absurd number of
digits).
-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461


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