| From: | Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> |
|---|---|
| To: | Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> |
| Cc: | Gregory Stark <gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu>, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(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: | 2006-09-11 22:42:09 |
| Message-ID: | 7348.1158014529@sss.pgh.pa.us |
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| Lists: | pgsql-hackers |
Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> At first I meant that as a reductio ad absurdum argument, but, uh,
> come to think of it why *do* we have our own arbitrary precision
> library? Is there any particular reason we can't use one of the
> existing binary implementations?
Going over to binary storage would trade off I/O speed for calculation
speed, which is probably not a win for everyone; and even more
seriously, how are you going to represent decimal fractions exactly?
The fact that 0.01 is 0.01 and not just a near approximation thereto
is critical for a lot of our users.
I have no objection to relying on someone else's package if it actually
solves our problem, but not if it just solves a related problem.
(It might be interesting to offer a "bignum" datatype that uses binary
math internally, but replacing numeric with it would be a hard sell.)
regards, tom lane
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