Re: Enum proposal / design

Jim C. Nasby wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 07:21:06PM -0400, Gregory Stark wrote:
> > This is the same issue we have with char(n) and numeric(x,y) already. If we
> > found a general solution for getting the type name to the enum would it also
> > help getting the typmod to char(n) and numeric(x,y)? Would it let us store
> > those as fixed sized data types?
>
> Hopefully. It would be great to also have a fixed-width raw/bytea field.
> See the recent discussions about adding a guid type, etc.
>
> How about this for a TODO:
>
> * Allow for field widths to be stored in the catalog instead of each tuple
>
> Data types such as char are usually used when the user knows that a
> field will always contain a fixed amount of data. In these cases,
> our char implementation is wasteful, because the varlena header
> always contains the same value. If there was a mechanism to obtain
> field widths from the catalog there would be no need to store the
> field width in each tuple. This would be useful for other types as
> well (UUID and ENUM, for example).

I don't think there is concensus on adding that.

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Bruce Momjian bruce(at)momjian(dot)us
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com

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