Re: custom function for converting human readable sizes to bytes

Hi

2016-02-15 10:16 GMT+01:00 Dean Rasheed <dean(dot)a(dot)rasheed(at)gmail(dot)com>:

> > On 12/02/16 10:19, Dean Rasheed wrote:
> >> This seems like a reasonable first patch for me as a committer, so
> >> I'll take it unless anyone else was planning to do so.
> >
>
> So looking at this, it seems that for the most part pg_size_bytes()
> will parse any output produced by pg_size_pretty(). The exception is
> that there are 2 versions of pg_size_pretty(), one that takes bigint
> and one that takes numeric, whereas pg_size_bytes() returns bigint, so
> it can't handle all inputs. Is there any reason not to make
> pg_size_bytes() return numeric?

> It would still be compatible with the example use cases, but it would
> be a better inverse of both variants of pg_size_pretty() and would be
> more future-proof. It already works internally using numeric, so it's
> a trivial change to make now, but impossible to change in the future
> without introducing a new function with a different name, which is
> messy.
>
> Thoughts?
>

This is a question. I have not a strong opinion about it. There are no any
technical objection - the result will be +/- same. But you will enforce
Numeric into outer expression evaluation.

The result will not be used together with function pg_size_pretty, but much
more with functions pg_relation_size, pg_relation_size, .. and these
functions doesn't return Numeric. These functions returns bigint. Bigint is
much more natural type for this purpose.

Is there any use case for Numeric?

Regards

Pavel

>
> Regards,
> Dean
>