Tom Lane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > No, that got rejected as being too much of a restriction of the dynamic > range, eg John's comment here: > http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2005-12/msg00246.php
That logic seems questionable. John makes two points: a) crypto applications are within a factor of two of the proposed limitation. Firstly, nobody does actual crypto work using Postgres's numeric data type. It would be ridiculously slow. They wouldn't even store numbers used for crypto in it, they would use bytea or something like that to store a binary bitstring. Secondly, there's nothing blocking us from changing it again in the future. It would make pg_upgrade a pain but solving user-defined datatypes being redefined would be a necessity anyways. A future version could always revert the change. b) Because we're usually not especially concerned with CPU usage of numeric we're also not concerned with space usage of numeric. I'm not sure what the arguments were that he's referring to but I have trouble imagining a credible argument against being concerned for cpu usage that wouldn't result in the conclusion that space usage was *more* important. I was actually going to suggest going back and looking for *more* space savings in numeric. I had assumed this first step had gone in long ago. -- Gregory Stark EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org
