On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 12:58:46AM -0700, Scara Maccai wrote: > I've altready asked this some months ago, but I've never seen any answers: > > why do multidimensional arrays have to have matching extents for each > dimension?
Because the dimensions define the rectangular bounds of the array in n-dimensional space and not some arbitrarily complex shape. This would be different from, say, Java where an array is always in 1-dimensional space and to "simulate" n-dimensional arrays you have arrays whose elements point to other arrays. These are semantically different things but modern languages choose to blur the distinction for reasons of simplicity. > Is there any way this limit can be removed, even using a custom datatype? What you're after is a way to have arrays of arrays; I could do the following to get it sort of working: CREATE TABLE foo ( a INT[] ); INSERT INTO foo VALUES (ARRAY[1,2,3]); INSERT INTO foo VALUES (ARRAY[9]); INSERT INTO foo VALUES (ARRAY[100,101,102,103,104]); SELECT ARRAY(SELECT foo FROM foo); SELECT (ARRAY(SELECT foo FROM foo))[1].a[1]; it's not very pretty or nice to work with (the literals look especially nasty) but it seems to hold together (in 8.3 at least). Sam -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
