Thread: X.50x OID representation

X.50x OID representation

From
"redhog"
Date:
I need to save something very similar to X.50x IOD:s, that is, paths
where the path-components are numbers. For example: 10.5.5003.24.35.

Futhermore, I need to sort these in numerical path order, so that if
two paths are compared according to the first path component that
differs, and this path component is compared numerically, so that e.g.
100 is considered greater than 1.

Is there a suitable datatype in PostgreSQL, or some other way to
achieve this? Storing the paths as strings would make path-components
of different length compare wrongly, e.g. "91" would be considered
greater than "900", since the second digit 1 is greater than the second
digit 0.

One possibility is to store the paths as strings but with the digits
within each path component reversed, so that e.g. 4711 becomes 1174.
This would work, given that the path-separator compares less than all
digits, but is rather uggly and requires a bit of nasty rewriting when
updating/inserting/reading rows.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,
Egil


Re: X.50x OID representation

From
Martijn van Oosterhout
Date:
On Tue, Nov 07, 2006 at 03:57:43AM -0800, redhog wrote:
> I need to save something very similar to X.50x IOD:s, that is, paths
> where the path-components are numbers. For example: 10.5.5003.24.35.

Looks like something for ltree, which is a datatype for storing
tree-structured data.

http://projects.commandprompt.com/public/pgsql/browser/trunk/pgsql/contrib/ltree/README.ltree

Hope this helps,
--
Martijn van Oosterhout   <kleptog@svana.org>   http://svana.org/kleptog/
> From each according to his ability. To each according to his ability to litigate.

Attachment

Re: X.50x OID representation

From
"redhog"
Date:
> Looks like something for ltree, which is a datatype for storing
> tree-structured data.
>
> http://projects.commandprompt.com/public/pgsql/browser/trunk/pgsql/contrib/ltree/README.ltree

Unfourtunately, ltree seems to compare node labels in lexicographic
order:

 "have their usual meanings. Comparison is doing in the order of direct
tree traversing, children of a node are sorted lexicographic."

Maybe it is possible to hack it to support numeric order, but that
would mean I'd introduce a new non-approoved patch that users of my
application would have to apply to their database in order to run my
application. Since my application is vaguely security related, that is
a big non-no - I need to keep dependencies and code simple and easy to
get an overview of and review...