Leslie S Satenstein <lsatenstein@yahoo.com> writes:
> A good compromise is to perhaps consider the following.
> The bigint type should only be used if the integer range is insufficient, because calculation with the latter is
definitelyfaster.
This doesn't seem to me to fix the basic problem, which is that "the
latter" appears to refer to "integer range". You don't calculate with
ranges, but with types. Maybe it should be
The bigint type should only be used if the range of the integer
type is insufficient, because the latter is definitely faster.
I'm not that excited about making the text specify that calculations are
faster, because on most modern machines the actual calculation speed
difference is pretty minuscule. What's expensive about bigint is
pushing around twice as much data and/or having to do palloc's.
regards, tom lane