Re: [HACKERS] Data type removal

On Tue, 24 Mar 1998, David Gould wrote:

> What is the motivation for data type removal?

    There appear to be two "motivations" from what I'm hearing:

    1. reduced memory footprint
    2. reduced "disk" footprint

    From what I've been able to gather, I believe that ppl are
expecting that the result is a faster server, based on less "perceived"
fat...nobody has yet been able to prove that though, which I believe
Darren is working on.

    Part of this does have me thinking though, in that one of the
*big* features that I perceived PostgreSQL to have was the fact that it
was/is very easy to extend our datatypes and functions without having to
recompile the server.

    So, right now, I'm kinda sitting on the fence in that I'm curious
if we *are* taking anything away by moving the geometrics from inside of
the server to a loadable module, given that the fact that we *are* able to
do that is what appears to be one of our major points of "uniqueness"...

    Right now, there has been alot of speculation as to whether or not
moving the geometrics into a loadable module or not would gain (or lose,
for that matter) us anything...

    Let's say we have a $prefix/modules directory, where we move the
geometrics stuff into.  And, let's say we have an 'loadmod' command added
that, if someone did 'loadmod geometrics;' from psql, it loaded up the
geometrics module...would we have the *same* functionality as if it were
compiled in, like it is now?  Or we would lose something?

    To me, this is one of the *biggest* features of PostgreSQL, the
fact that we can easily add in new features without recompiling...but
without seeing actual numbers (performance as well as "disk"), we can
discuss this till we are blue in the face.

    Darren...if you want to provide us with a working model of this,
using the geometrics, so be it...I won't say that it will or won't be
integrated without seeing this in operation, and without seeing some
*actual* benefit to it...as the saying goes "Talk is Cheap..."

    So, I say, let's leave this as a "to be researched" and wait for
something concrete to look at...

Marc G. Fournier
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: scrappy@hub.org           secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org