Re: Fixed length data types issue

Gregory Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> writes:
> Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes:
>> No, that got rejected as being too much of a restriction of the dynamic
>> range, eg John's comment here:
>> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2005-12/msg00246.php

> That logic seems questionable. John makes two points:

> a) crypto applications are within a factor of two of the proposed limitation.

> Firstly, nobody does actual crypto work using Postgres's numeric data type.
> It would be ridiculously slow.

That's utterly irrelevant.  The point is that there are standard
applications today in which people need that much precision; therefore,
the argument that "10^508 is far more than anyone could want" is on
exceedingly shaky ground.

Besides, isn't "it's too slow" a bug we'd like to fix someday?
        regards, tom lane