Re: pg_class catalog question...

Jim C. Nasby wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 31, 2006 at 11:29:15AM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>> This argument falls flat when you consider that the width of a CHAR
>> entry is measured in characters, not bytes, and therefore its physical
>> size is not fixed even if its logical width is.
> 
> True, but in every case I've used char it was to store something that
> would never be multi-byte, like a GUID, or a SHA1. Though I guess in
> retrospect, what would really be handy is 'hex' datatype, that stores a
> hex string (possibly with a custom format, such as a GUID) in it's
> native binary format.

Why not simply a fixed number of bytes, i.e. byte(16) or octet(16)? Hexadecimal is just a 
convenient human-readable representation.

Regards,
Thomas Hallgren