Re: papers on datatype design

[2001-12-07 22:58] Brook Milligan said:
| Does anyone know of papers discussing issues that arise in the design
| of specific datatypes intended to represent particular real-world
| information?  I am thinking of situations more complex than simply
| choosing among existing standard datatypes.  In some instances,
| existing datatypes do not adequately represent the type of information
| required; therefore, additional design must be undertaken.
|
| To date, I have found essentially nothing on this issue.  Any pointers
| would be extremely helpful.

  PostgreSQL has a /very/ nice system of creating user-defined types,
however I am not aware of any papers directly related to design of
user-defined types for PostgreSQL.  There are numerous examples
available in the contrib/ directory of all recent PostgreSQL releases.

  I'd recommend reading over relevant documentation[1] to familiarize
yourself with PG's type facilities, then take a look at some of the
user-defined types in contrib/ to see some "real-world" user-defined
types.

[1] http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/type-system.html
    http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/xtypes.html

cheers.
  brent

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