Re: FP16 Support?

2017-11-14 10:33 GMT+09:00 Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>:
> On Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 1:11 PM, Kohei KaiGai <kaigai(at)heterodb(dot)com> wrote:
>> Any opinions?
>
> The only reason I can think of for having it in core is that you might
> want to use standard SQL notation FLOAT(10) to refer to it. Right now
> our parser converts that to float4 but it could map precisions up to
> 10 to float2. The need for such special treatment is one of my
> arguments for considering SQL:2016 DECFLOAT(n) in core PostgreSQL.
> But this case is different: FLOAT(10) already works, it just maps to a
> type with a larger significand, as permitted by the standard. So why
> not just do these short floats as an extension type?
>
Our extension will be able to provide its own "half" or "float2" data type
using CREATE TYPE, indeed. I thought it is useful to other people, even
if they are not interested in the in-database analytics with GPU, to reduce
amount of storage consumption.

Of course, it is my opinion.

Thanks,
--
HeteroDB, Inc / The PG-Strom Project
KaiGai Kohei <kaigai(at)heterodb(dot)com>