Re: BUG #2802: Feature request: tinyint and unsigned types

Jim Nasby <decibel(at)decibel(dot)org> writes:
> Is there any technical reason why we don't support unsigned ints or
> tinyint? Just a matter of no one feeling the itch?

The question is whether it's worth complicating the numeric-type
promotion hierarchy even more. A variant int type probably isn't worth
much if it doesn't interact naturally with arithmetic & comparisons with
other int types, but we've found out the hard way that you can't have a
huge number of possible interpretations, or you get too many "can't
resolve which operator to use" errors. (See the archives for details.)

My private suspicion is that 90% of the people who say they want tinyint
are really looking for a enum type, and thus that Tom Dunstan's recent
patch for enum support might solve their problem. (Did Tom's patch
allow for the storage size to vary depending on the number of values?
Those folk won't be satisfied if not, even though we all know that
alignment issues frequently negate any savings...)

As for unsigned, you can use OID as uint4 if you must.

regards, tom lane