Re: Reducing the overhead of NUMERIC data

On 11/2/05, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-11-01 at 18:15 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> > Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> > > Anybody like to work out a piece of SQL to perform data profiling and
> > > derive the distribution of values with trailing zeroes?
> >
> > Don't forget leading zeroes. And all-zero (we omit digits entirely in
> > that case). I don't think you can claim that zero isn't a common case.
>
> The question is: how common?
>
> For INTEGERs I would accept that many are often zero. For NUMERIC, these
> are seldom exactly zero, IMHO.

Seconded. My INTEGER data does have a quite a few zeros but most of
my NUMERIC columns hold debits and credits. Those are almost never
zero.

>
> This is one of those issues where we need to run tests and take input.
> We cannot decide this sort of thing just by debate alone. So, I'll leave
> this as a less potentially fruitful line of enquiry.
>
> Best Regards, Simon Riggs
>
>
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--
Mike Rylander
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GPLS -- PINES Development
Database Developer
http://open-ils.org