Re: [HACKERS] UNICODE characters vs. BINARY

Thomas Lockhart wrote:

> postgres=> create table x (i smallint);
> CREATE
> postgres=> create table y (j bigint);
> ERROR:  Unable to locate type name 'bigint' in catalog

so BIGINT (as a synonym for INT8 is not supported). Is
BIGINT not a standard SQL92 or de Facto?

BTW: I have tried to make BIGINT a synonym of INT8 using
CREATE TYPE with the parameters I've got from pg_type
but it would not work.

> afaik we support the type names defined in SQL92 (like smallint),
> historical names in Postgres, and some extensions. What more do we
> need?

I'm not entirely sure which types in pg_type are historical
but unsupported and which do work.  For example: what is
"bytea" ... I remember darkly that this was an array of bytes
in original Postgres? But I may be mistaken. Why do I ask?
Because I see the need to store small byte sequences w/o
having to deploy the large object inversion.  For example
if I want to store 128 bit UUIDs (or something similar with
128 bits) I need this as a straight byte sequence, indexable
of course -- not as a CHAR (since no character conversion should
occur and these bytes are not printable), not as a BLOB.

Then, how much do we guarrantee about PostgreSQL internal OIDs?
What if I want to use OIDs directly in the context of a multiple
data bases. Is there any way to control assignment of OIDs so
that cooperation with other databases would be possible?

thanks,
-Gunther


My original question was:
> > A related question is whether we could support some more
> > standard names for data types (e.g., BIGINT, SMALLINT, etc.)
> > But I'm not sure there is really any standard. I would be
> > willing to work a little on these data types but I'd need
> > someone to hint me on who else is doing stuff and, if possible,
> > where to look first (and what known mistakes to avoid.)


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