On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 10:29 PM, Joseph Adams
<joeyadams3.14159@gmail.com> wrote:
> It seems to me a reasonable way to implement VARIANT would be to have
> a data type called VARIANT that stores an OID of the inner type at the
> beginning, followed by the binary data.
That's likely to be how it gets implemented, but you seem to have
missed the point of some of the discussion upthread: the big problem
with that is that someone might type "DROP TYPE foo", and when they
do, you need an efficient way to figure out whether foo is in use
inside an instance of the variant type anywhere in the system. The
devil is in the details...
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company