Re: smallserial / serial2

On Jun 8, 2011, at 5:36 PM, Brar Piening wrote:
> Pros
> Mike Pultz (patch author): "since serial4 and serial8 are simply pseudo-types- effectively there for convenience, I’d
arguethat it should simply be there for completeness" 
> Robert Haas: "We should be trying to put all types on equal footing, rather than artificially privilege some over
others."
> Brar Piening (me): "I'm with the above arguments. In addition I'd like to mention that other databases have it too so
havingit improves portability. Especially when using ORM." 
> Perhaps we can get some more opinions...

We have some "dynamic lookup table" metacode that sets up all the infrastructure for a table that normalizes text
valuesto a serial/int. But in many cases, it's a safe bet that we would never need more than 32k (or at worst, 64k)
values.Right now it would be difficult to benefit from the 2 byte savings, but if Postgres was ever able to order
fieldson disk in the most efficient possible format (something we're willing to sponsor, hint hint ;) then this would
bebeneficial for us. 
--
Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect                   jim@nasby.net
512.569.9461 (cell)                         http://jim.nasby.net