"Mark Woodward" <pgsql@mohawksoft.com> writes:
>> 2. Performance. Doing this would require widening Datum to 64 bits,
>> which is a system-wide performance hit on 32-bit machines.
> Do you really think it would make a measurable difference, more so than
> your proposed solution? (I'm skeptical it would be measurable at all)
I'm too lazy to run an experiment, but I believe it would. Datum is
involved in almost every function-call API in the backend. In
particular this means that it would affect performance-critical code
paths. Creation of tables and such isn't performance-critical in most
applications, so a few percent overhead there doesn't bother me. A few
percent across the board is another story.
regards, tom lane