Re: Do we need multiple forms of the SQL2003 statistics

Tom, thank you for the reviewing/correcting/applying my patches...

On Fri, 28 Jul 2006, Tom Lane wrote:

> I wrote:
>> There is room to argue that the numeric-arithmetic version would be
>> worth having on the grounds of greater precision or range, but it's a
>> big chunk of code and the public demand for the functionality has not
>> exactly been overwhelming.
>
>> Comments?
>
> Since no one's even bothered to respond, I take it there's insufficient
> interest in the numeric versions of these aggregates.  I've committed
> just the float8 versions.


My opinion on that is 
1) I agree that really the float4 version are useless, because they don't
offer anything new... comparing to the float8 
2) But I think the numeric versions of these functions are not useless...
(if somebody have numeric columns... ) 
I don't think the 10-15 additional functions in pg_proc is too much. 
Concerning to the amount of code in numeric.c I think it is large, but not
complicated at all, so I don't think that it will be a problem to support
that code.

I think since we are supporting the numeric type as a special 
high-precision type, Postgres must have the high-precision 
versions of all computational functions. Just my opinion.

>
> I added some very trivial regression tests, which we'll have to keep an
> eye on to see if they have any portability problems.  We may need to
> back off the number of displayed fraction digits to get them to pass
> everywhere.
>
> If anyone wants to do better tests, feel free...

I will try to write some better tests and send a patch.

Regards,    Sergey

*******************************************************************
Sergey E. Koposov
Max Planck Institute for Astronomy/Sternberg Astronomical Institute
Tel: +49-6221-528-349
Web: http://lnfm1.sai.msu.ru/~math
E-mail: math@sai.msu.ru