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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DRILL-4834?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=15423322#comment-15423322
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ASF GitHub Bot commented on DRILL-4834:
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Github user daveoshinsky commented on the issue:

    https://github.com/apache/drill/pull/570
  
    The initial set of check-ins as of 8/16/2016 demonstrates use of a new 
one-size-fits-all VARDECIMAL type, initially only to support variable width 
BINARY decimal columns from Parquet files (see DRILL-4184).   For now, the new 
VARDECIMAL type exists alongside all of the other decimal types.  If this 
change looks good, we can eventually clean up the decimal logic by deprecating 
all of the other (fixed width) decimal types, and use VARDECIMAL only.  The 
Cast behavior may be somewhat strange at present (it was seen to cast from an 
int to VARDECIMAL via FLOAT8).  A unit test with some test data is included.


> decimal implementation is vulnerable to overflow errors, and extremely complex
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: DRILL-4834
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DRILL-4834
>             Project: Apache Drill
>          Issue Type: Bug
>          Components: Execution - Data Types
>    Affects Versions: 1.6.0
>         Environment: Drill 1.7 on any platform
>            Reporter: Dave Oshinsky
>             Fix For: Future
>
>
> While working on a fix for DRILL-4704, logic was added to CastIntDecimal.java 
> template to handle the situation where a precision is not supplied (i.e., the 
> supplied precision is zero) for an integer value that is to be casted to a 
> decimal.  The Drill decimal implementation uses a limited selection of fixed 
> decimal precision data types (the total number of decimal digits, i.e., 
> Decimal9, 18, 28, 38) to represent decimal values.  If the destination 
> precision is too small to represent the input integer that is being casted, 
> there is no clean way to deal with the overflow error properly.
> While using fixed decimal precisions as is being done currently can lead to 
> more efficient use of memory, it often will actually lead to less efficient 
> use of memory (when the fixed precision is specified significantly larger 
> than is actually needed to represent the numbers), and it results in a 
> tremendous mushrooming of the complexity of the code.  For each fixed 
> precision (and there are only a limited set of selections, 9, 18, 28, 38, 
> which itself leads to memory inefficiency), there is a separate set of code 
> generated from templates.  For each pairwise combination of decimal or 
> non-decimal numeric types, there are multiple places in the code where 
> conversions must be handled, or conditions must be included to handle the 
> difference in precision between the two types.  A one-size-fits-all approach 
> (using a variable width vector to represent any decimal precision) would 
> usually be more memory-efficient (since precisions are often over-specified), 
> and would greatly simplify the code.
> Also see the DRILL-4184 issue, which is related.



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