Re: Hashable custom types

David Fetter <david@fetter.org> writes:
> On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 04:47:49PM -0700, Paul Ramsey wrote:
>> ERROR:  could not implement recursive UNION
>> DETAIL:  All column datatypes must be hashable.

> This leads to an interesting question, which is why does our
> implementation require this.  I'm guessing it's a performance
> optimization.

Well, you clearly need to have a notion of equality for each column
datatype, or else UNION doesn't mean anything.

In general we consider that a datatype's notion of equality can
be defined either by its default btree opclass (which supports
sort-based query algorithms) or by its default hash opclass
(which supports hash-based query algorithms).

The plain UNION code supports either sorting or hashing, but
we've not gotten around to supporting a sort-based approach
to recursive UNION.  I'm not convinced that it's worth doing ...
        regards, tom lane