Re: [HACKERS] Re: Trouble with float4 afterupgrading from 6.5.3 to 7.0.2

At 10:04 8/08/00 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>
>No. What float4-to-text really does is *discard* information, by
>rounding off the printed result to only 7 digits (when there are
>actually 7-and-change in there). This means values that are actually
>distinct float4 values may get printed as the same thing:
>

Thanks guys for some remarkably patient explanations. I now know more than
I want to know about float values.

>I don't much care for this behavior (since it means dump and reload of
>float columns is lossy), and I certainly won't hold still for
>introducing it into other operations on floats.

This makes me think that some kind of binary dump in pg_dump is probably
not a bad idea. Has anybody looked at doing a cross-platform binary COPY?
Or some other way of representing base types - we have <type>in/out maybe
<type>exp/imp (export/import) might be useful to get a portable, lossless
representation.

----------------------------------------------------------------
Philip Warner | __---_____
Albatross Consulting Pty. Ltd. |----/ - \
(A.B.N. 75 008 659 498) | /(@) ______---_
Tel: (+61) 0500 83 82 81 | _________ \
Fax: (+61) 0500 83 82 82 | ___________ |
Http://www.rhyme.com.au | / \|
| --________--
PGP key available upon request, | /
and from pgp5.ai.mit.edu:11371 |/