Re: [GENERAL] arrays

On Sun, 29 Sep 2002, Bruce Momjian wrote:

Apologies in advance if there is a more appropriate list.

We are currently developing a database to host some complicated, XMl
layered data. We have chosen postgres because of its ability to store
multidimensional arrays. We feel that using these will allow us to
simplify the database structure considerably by storing some data in
multidimensional arrays.

However, we currently have some dissenters who believe that using the
multidimensional arrays will make queries slower and unneccesarily
complicated. Its hard for us to evaluate in advance because none of us
have much experience with postgres (we are web based and have relied on
MySQL for most projects up to this point).

I have several questions related to the scenario above.

1) are SQL queries slower when extracting data from multidimensional
arrays
2) are table joins more difficult or unneccesarily complicated
3) can you do selects on only a portion of a multidimensional array. That
is, if you were storing multilanguage titles in a two dimensional array,

[en], "english title"
[fr], "french title"

could you select where title[0] = 'en'

I know these may sound like terribily stupid questions. but we need some
quick guidance before proceeding with a schema that relies on these
advanced data features of postgres

tia

mike


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