Re: [HACKERS] Reducing the overhead of NUMERIC data - Mailing list pgsql-patches

"Tom Lane" <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote
>
> If we were willing to invent the "varlena2" datum format then we could
> save four bytes per numeric, plus reduce numeric's alignment requirement
> from int to short which would probably save another byte per value on
> average.  I'm not sure that that's worth doing if numeric and inet are
> the only beneficiaries, but it might be.
>

I would support "varlena2" from user's applications. Another benefit is for
char types. Many applications are from DB2, Oracle or SQL Server:

        Max Char Length
DB2         32672
SQL         8000
Oracle      4000

All of above just need varlena2. To support bigger char types, we could
follow the tradition "long varchar", etc.

Regards,
Qingqing