Gregory Stark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > At first I meant that as a reductio ad absurdum argument, but, uh, > come to think of it why *do* we have our own arbitrary precision > library? Is there any particular reason we can't use one of the > existing binary implementations?
Going over to binary storage would trade off I/O speed for calculation speed, which is probably not a win for everyone; and even more seriously, how are you going to represent decimal fractions exactly? The fact that 0.01 is 0.01 and not just a near approximation thereto is critical for a lot of our users. I have no objection to relying on someone else's package if it actually solves our problem, but not if it just solves a related problem. (It might be interesting to offer a "bignum" datatype that uses binary math internally, but replacing numeric with it would be a hard sell.) regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org