On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 08:24:16AM -0500, John D. Burger wrote: > >>There are practical applications, eg, 1024-bit keys are fairly common > >>objects in cryptography these days, and that equates to about 10^308. > >>I don't really foresee anyone trying to run crypto algorithms with SQL > >>NUMERIC arithmetic, though ... > > > >2046 bit keys are becoming more common. However, math using these keys > >is > >usually done modulo a product of two primes and there are ways of > >doing the > >calculations that are going to be much faster than doing them the way > >Postgres does. So it is unlikely that anyone would be using Postgres' > >numeric > >type to do this in any case. > > Nonetheless, the fact that people can think of practical applications > for numbers whose length is easily within a factor of two of the > proposed limitation makes me squeamish about it being shrunk. Also, I > would say the same arguments about doing math with NUMERICs suggest > that saving a few byes in representation is not a big deal. On the few > occasions where I have used NUMERICs, I didn't care about stuff like > that. I think that if there are any esoteric cases where people are doing these kinds of things with numeric, they could probably be best answered by offering a completely different system anyway, using a different type name. The 5 people in the world doing this will just have to change their code I guess... ;) -- Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant jnasby@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Pervasive Software http://pervasive.com work: 512-231-6117 vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf cell: 512-569-9461
