Re: Reducing NUMERIC size for 8.3

"Simon Riggs" <simon@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> We've changed the on-disk database format in 8.3, so we have an
> opportunity to change other things also. There is a patch thats been on
> the patch queue for some time called numeric508, submitted Dec 2005;

I thought that idea had been rejected long since as being an unreasonable
reduction in the flexibility of numeric arithmetic.

> The benefit of the patch is that it reduces each NUMERIC value by 2
> bytes, so will speed up things considerably. This is now especially
> important if we are looking to reduce the speed of numeric division by a
> factor of 4 (recent WIP patch).

The only way that patch would make division faster is by making the
slowest cases (longest input numbers) impossible.  Which is hardly a
solution.
        regards, tom lane