Re: Reducing the overhead of NUMERIC data

On Fri, Nov 04, 2005 at 04:30:27PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Jim C. Nasby" <jnasby@pervasive.com> writes:
> > On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 10:32:03AM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> I'd feel a lot happier about this if we could keep the dynamic range
> >> up to, say, 10^512 so that it's still true that NUMERIC can be a
> >> universal parse-time representation.  That would also make it even
> >> more unlikely that anyone would complain about loss of functionality.
> 
> > Would it be feasable to have a type that satisfies that constraint but
> > isn't generally intended for on-disk use? My thought is that this new
> > type would be used mostly for casting purposes. Kind of like the
> > UNKNOWNNUMBER but easier to do since it'd just be another type.
> 
> What exactly would be easier about it?  ISTM you just described
> UNKNOWNNUMERIC to a T.

Apologies then; it sounded like UNKNOWNNUMERIC was going to be something
that was internal-use only, presumably making it much harder to
implement than just adding an additional type.
-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461