On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 3:57 PM, Simon Riggs <si...@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 5:58 PM, Alvaro Herrera <alvhe...@alvh.no-ip.org> > wrote: > > > A customer came to us with this request: a way to store "any" data in a > > column. We've gone back and forth trying to determine reasonable > > implementation restrictions, safety and useful semantics for them. > > I note that this has been requested in the past: > > http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2004-02/msg01266.php > > I think its a reasonably common use case. > > Would it be possible to do this with a "typed" hstore? Seems easier to > add something there than it would be to add the VARIANT type as > discussed here. > > > > both Oracle and MS-SQL have it > > Do they? What types are they called? > > -- > Simon Riggs http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ > PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services > > MS SQL Server calls it's variant type 'sql_variant', but it's limited to a subset of the data types they support. Basically, it can store any numeric type, or any binary or text type with a constrained length. No timestamps, geometry, XML, user-defined types, etc. allowed. So it's not really as much of an "any value" type as it might look on the surface. Don't know any details of Oracle's implementation. -Eric
