Bill Moran <wmoran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > Tom Lane <tgl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Other questions you'd have to think about: what is the data type of >> 0xffffffff; what do you do with 0xffffffffffffffffffffffff (too big >> even for int8). And it'd likely behoove you to check how Microsoft >> answers those questions, if you want to point to SQL Server as what's >> going to keep you out of standards-compatibility problems. (IOW, >> if 0x ever did get standardized, the text might well match what >> SQL Server does.) > MSSQL seems to use it specifically for the equivalent of BYTEA types, > and it seems to me that should be how it works in PostgreSQL. Oh really? Wow, I'd just assumed you wanted this as a way to write integers. That's certainly the use-case I would have personally. I'm not even sure I like the idea of being able to write byteas without quotes --- they seem like strings to me, not numbers. > If an implicit cast from a 4-byte BYTEA to int works now, then it > should work ... otherwise an explicit cast would be needed, with the > same behavior if you tried to specify a number that overflows an int > in any other way. There's no cast at all from bytea to int. For one thing, it's quite unclear what endianness should be assumed for such a cast. (To get unsurprising behavior from what you're describing, I think we'd have to use a big-endian interpretation of the bytea; but that would be a pain for a lot of other scenarios, or even for this case if you'd written a bytea of length other than 4 or 8 bytes.) regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
