Re: Fixed length data types issue

From: mark(at)mark(dot)mielke(dot)cc
To: Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>
Cc: Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us>, Gregory Stark <gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu>, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net>, pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org, Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog(at)svana(dot)org>
Subject: Re: Fixed length data types issue
Date: 2006-09-14 21:57:25
Message-ID: 20060914215724.GA5322@mark.mielke.cc
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On Thu, Sep 14, 2006 at 10:21:30PM +0100, Gregory Stark wrote:
> >> One very nifty trick would be to fix "char" to act as CHAR(), and map
> >> CHAR(1) automatically to "char".
> > Sorry, probably a stupid idea considering multi-byte encodings. I
> > suppose it could be an optimization for single-byte encodings, but that
> > seems very limiting.
> No, there are lots of single-byte encoding databases. And one day we'll have
> per-column encoding anyways and there are lots of databases that have columns
> that want to be one-character ascii encoded fields.
>
> It's limited but I wouldn't say it's very limiting. In the cases where it
> doesn't apply there's no way out anyways. A UTF8 field will need a length
> header in some form.

Declaring a column as ASCII should allow for char(8) to mean the same
as byte(8) with text semantics. byte(8) shouldn't require a length
header. :-)

Cheers,
mark

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