Re: Reduce NUMERIC size by 2 bytes, reduce max length to 508 digits

Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> writes:
> On Fri, Dec 02, 2005 at 07:37:49PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>> So the product I fancifully mentioned would weigh in somewhere around
>> 10^300, and thus be *well* within the capability of even the proposed
>> restricted numeric format.

> I think numbers much bigger than that are only useful for theoretical
> mathemeticians.

There are practical applications, eg, 1024-bit keys are fairly common
objects in cryptography these days, and that equates to about 10^308.
I don't really foresee anyone trying to run crypto algorithms with SQL
NUMERIC arithmetic, though ...

            regards, tom lane