Re: intarray - benefits over regular int[]?

Thanks,

The line about it being faster gives me the reassurance that I need. From
just the introduction I was unsure of the actual benefit over int[] - the
operators look like they can all be replicated using the standard library,
albeit in much more convoluted ways! Is it general advice therefore that
if I've got an array of intergers, no nulls, it is advantageous for me to
install and use intarray, and I'd really only want to use int[] if I had
nulls? Or is there something more to it?

Kind regards,

Conor

On Mon, Aug 21, 2017 at 9:02 PM, David G. Johnston <
david(dot)g(dot)johnston(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 21, 2017 at 12:33 PM, <theconor(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
>> The following documentation comment has been logged on the website:
>>
>> Page: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/intarray.html
>> Description:
>>
> ​[...]​
>
>
>> At the moment I am a little unclear whether intarray is effectively a
>> deprecated module, or if it can still provide some distinct advantages -
>> e.g. performance, features or just a handy syntax -- for new projects too?
>>
>
> ​A quick skim of this and the generic array functions/operators
> documentation shows that numerous functions and operators exist for
> intarray that do not have equivalents in core. For that alone I'd say this
> extension remains not-deprecated.
>
> Its implied that it also performs better, ostensibly because the code need
> only considered non-null integer arrays whereas the general functions have
> to consider arrays of all types. I'm not aware of any recent benchmark
> runs that would indicate whether improvements to arrays in recent versions
> of PostgreSQL have narrowed or eliminated that gap.
>
> David J.
>