On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 12:46 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Leslie S Satenstein <lsatenstein@yahoo.com> writes:
>> A good compromise is to perhaps consider the following.
>
>> The bigint type should only be used if the integer range is insufficient, because calculation with the latter is
definitelyfaster.
>
> This doesn't seem to me to fix the basic problem, which is that "the
> latter" appears to refer to "integer range". You don't calculate with
> ranges, but with types. Maybe it should be
>
> The bigint type should only be used if the range of the integer
> type is insufficient, because the latter is definitely faster.
>
> I'm not that excited about making the text specify that calculations are
> faster, because on most modern machines the actual calculation speed
> difference is pretty minuscule. What's expensive about bigint is
> pushing around twice as much data and/or having to do palloc's.
Yeah, I was actually wondering whether the first step here might be to
benchmark this.
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
