Maybe you are right. I am currently storing these values in a separate table and was looking for a way to optimize it. Without trying to pretend to be an expert on this I thought that using arrays, storing calculated values, or using materialized views in a database all violate the rules of normalization. I thought that you do all of these for optimization: use matviews or store calculated values when you want to access your data very often, and use arrays when you want to access your data within the array very rarely. My reasoning was why to store many millions of rows in a table when I would only need less than 1% of that frequently and the rest probably only once in the live system (we would need to analyze that offline). The data comes in as a single update of the array field (fast), than I put the items I will need into a separate table with a function - admiteddly it takes time to do that but I only need to do that once - and I will query the resulting table many times. So it seemed logical. Independently from my case I found a few topics about creating a rowset from an array in the archive which suggested that its not only me who could benefit from an easier way to manipulate this datatype. regards, Balázs -----Original Message----- From: Tino Wildenhain [mailto:tino@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: 2006. január 3. 18:59 To: SunWuKung Cc: pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: [GENERAL] generic way to retrieve array as rowset SunWuKung schrieb: > Thank you both, I will make good use of this. > > On a side note: isn't it a pity this has to be so difficult? Well the pity is your data model - or the lack of it ;)) If redesign is possible, you probably want to change from array to real connected table. *wink* ;) Tino
