Re: GUC with units, details

Neil Conway wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-07-25 at 19:00 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> > Maybe I'm missing something, but I thought it was fairly common to
> > use "k" for 1000, "K" for 1024, etc (mnemonic: upper case for the
> > larger multiplier).
>
> Well, that only works for K vs. k: the SI prefix for mega is M
> (meaning 10^6), not "m". Similarly for "G".

Indeed. The k vs K idea is an excuse for not wanting to side with
either camp, but it does not scale.

> Why it is "impractical" to use the IEC prefixes?

I'd imagine that one of the first things someone will want to try is
something like SET work_mem TO '10MB', which will fail or misbehave
because 10000000 bytes do not divide up into chunks of 1024 bytes. Who
wants to explain to users that they have to write '10MiB'?

Since about forever, PostgreSQL has used kB, MB, GB to describe memory
allocation. If we want to change that, we ought to do it across the
board. But that's a big board.

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