Re: Fixed length data types issue

On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 01:15:43PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> > In any case it seems a bit backwards to me. Wouldn't it be better to
> > preserve bits in the case of short length words where they're precious
> > rather than long ones? If we make 0xxxxxxx the 1-byte case it means ...
> Well, I don't find that real persuasive: you're saying that it's
> important to have a 1-byte not 2-byte header for datums between 64 and
> 127 bytes long. Which is by definition less than a 2% savings for those
> values. I think its's more important to pick bitpatterns that reduce
> the number of cases heap_deform_tuple has to think about while decoding
> the length of a field --- every "if" in that inner loop is expensive.

I like your thought process on this, Tom. I read your suggestions and
didn't respond because I was in full agreement with them.

The 1-byte header would be valuable even if it only worked for
32-bytes. It is important to keep CPU overhead down by making it
easy to switch off the bit patterns.

Cheers,
mark

--
mark(at)mielke(dot)cc / markm(at)ncf(dot)ca / markm(at)nortel(dot)com __________________________
. . _ ._ . . .__ . . ._. .__ . . . .__ | Neighbourhood Coder
|\/| |_| |_| |/ |_ |\/| | |_ | |/ |_ |
| | | | | \ | \ |__ . | | .|. |__ |__ | \ |__ | Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them...

http://mark.mielke.cc/