Re: Do we need multiple forms of the SQL2003 statistics

Sergey E. Koposov wrote:
> I think since we are supporting the numeric type as a special
> high-precision type, Postgres must have the high-precision
> versions of all computational functions. Just my opinion.

Another way to look at it is whether you want to have accurate
computations (numeric) or approximate computations (float). I'm not a
statistician, so I don't know what most of these functions are used
for. From a mathematician's point of view, however, some of these
functions normally produce irrational numbers anyway, so it seems
unlikely that numeric will be useful. But looking at the definition
of, say, regr_avgx(Y, X), if all the input values are integers, it
might be useful if I could get an exact integer or rational number as
output, instead of a float, that is.

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/