On 5/22/20 1:53 AM, Noah Misch wrote: > On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 01:40:10PM -0400, Robert Haas wrote: >> On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 6:15 PM Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: >>> There surely are use-cases for true rational arithmetic, but I'm >>> dubious that it belongs in core Postgres. I don't think that enough >>> of our users would want it to justify expending core-project maintenance >>> effort on it. So I'd be happier to see this as an out-of-core extension. >> As is often the case, I'm a little more positive about including this >> than Tom, but as is also often the case, I'm somewhat cautious, too. >> On the one hand, I think it would be cool to have and people would >> like it. But, On the other hand, I also think we'd only want it if >> we're convinced that it's a really good implementation and that >> there's not a competing design which is better, or even equally good. > I vote for keeping it out of core, mostly because writing rational numeric > code is so different from writing DBMS core code. (Many of our existing > types, like numeric and the geometric types, have the same problem. Let's not > invite more of that.) The optimal reviewer pools won't have much overlap, so > patches may sit awhile and/or settle for a cursory review. > > More language standard libraries provide "numeric"-style big decimals[1] than > provide big rationals[2], suggesting we're in good company. > > [1] > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_arbitrary-precision_arithmetic_software#Languages > [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_data_type#Language_support > >
I agree. Also the original rationale that people want to use it on RDS is pretty awful. We can't just add in every extension that some DBAAS provider doesn't support. I think we mark this as rejected. cheers andrew -- Andrew Dunstan https://www.2ndQuadrant.com PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services