On Thu, 3 Nov 2005, Simon Riggs wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-11-02 at 19:12 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> > Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes:
> > > Could someone please quantify how much bang we might get for what seems
> > > like quite a lot of bucks?
> > > I appreciate the need for speed, but the saving here strikes me as
> > > marginal at best, unless my instincts are all wrong (quite possible)
> >
> > Two bytes per numeric value is not a lot, agreed.
>
> I'm optimising for Data Warehousing. If you have a very large table with
> a higher proportion of numerics on it, then your saving can be >5% of
> tablesize which could be very useful. For the general user, it might
> produce less benefit, I accept.
>
> At the moment we've established we can do this fairly much for free.
> i.e. nobody cares about the drop in digits (to 255) and the other coding
I don't believe the above is safe to say, yet. AFAICS, this has been
discussed only on hackers (and patches) in this discussion, whereas this
sort of change should probably be brought up on general as well to get a
greater understanding of whether there are people who care. I expect that
there won't be, but given that I'm still not sure what the plan to support
applications upward is for this change, I think it's probably a good idea
to query a larger segment of the population.