Re: Reducing the overhead of NUMERIC data

Simon Riggs wrote:

>On Wed, 2005-11-02 at 19:12 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>  
>
>>Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes:
>>    
>>
>>>Could someone please quantify how much bang we might get for what seems 
>>>like quite a lot of bucks?
>>>I appreciate the need for speed, but the saving here strikes me as 
>>>marginal at best, unless my instincts are all wrong (quite possible)
>>>      
>>>
>>Two bytes per numeric value is not a lot, agreed.
>>    
>>
>
>I'm optimising for Data Warehousing. If you have a very large table with
>a higher proportion of numerics on it, then your saving can be >5% of
>tablesize which could be very useful. For the general user, it might
>produce less benefit, I accept.
>
>  
>

Well, it could also be argued that DW apps could often get away with 
using floating point types, even where the primary source needs to be in 
fixed point for accuracy, and that could generate lots of  savings in 
speed and space. But I guess everybody gets to make their own choices.

cheers

andrew