Re: Reducing the overhead of NUMERIC data

"Jim C. Nasby" <jnasby@pervasive.com> writes:
> On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 10:32:03AM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>> I'd feel a lot happier about this if we could keep the dynamic range
>> up to, say, 10^512 so that it's still true that NUMERIC can be a
>> universal parse-time representation.  That would also make it even
>> more unlikely that anyone would complain about loss of functionality.

> Would it be feasable to have a type that satisfies that constraint but
> isn't generally intended for on-disk use? My thought is that this new
> type would be used mostly for casting purposes. Kind of like the
> UNKNOWNNUMBER but easier to do since it'd just be another type.

What exactly would be easier about it?  ISTM you just described
UNKNOWNNUMERIC to a T.
        regards, tom lane