On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 12:18 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
>> Yeah, I'm of two minds on that. I thought that it made sense to use
>> integer identifiers internally for speed, but now I'm worried that the
>> effort to translate back and forth between strings and integers is
>> going to end up being more than any speed we might save.
>
> We do that for nodetags in stored query/expression trees, and I've never
> seen any indication that it costs enough to notice. It's definitely a
> huge win for anything that changes regularly, which seems like it'll be
> a pretty good description of event tags for at least the next few years.
Good analogy. In that case, as in what I'm proposing here, we use
integers in memory and text on disk.
--
Robert Haas
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