At 8:16 AM 6/24/97, Thomas G. Lockhart wrote:
>Postgres v6.1 allows one to specify a dimensionality for an array object
>when declaring that object/column. However, that specification is not
>used when decoding a field. Instead, the dimensionality is deduced from
>the input string itself. The dimensionality is stored with each field,
>and is used to encode the array on output. So, one is currently allowed
>to mix array dimensions within a column, but Postgres seems to keep that
>all straight for input and output.
This sounds funny to me. You mean if a column contains an array, its
dimension could vary from row to row? Maybe you want that sometimes, but I
wouldn't think that was normally desirable.
Maybe the correct solution is to have a normal, fixed dimension array type
and a variable-dimension array type as well. If we have to pick one of the
two I would vote for the fixed-dimension one. I think that is what you
would normally want and it should find some kinds of user errors that the
variable-dimension array type would miss.
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Feasibility of a new signature is currently being evaluated.
h.b.hotz@jpl.nasa.gov, or hbhotz@oxy.edu
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