I've been amusing myself the last several evenings by working on a reimplementation of the NUMERIC datatype, along the lines of previous discussion (use base-10000 digits instead of base-10 so that the number of iterations of the inner loops decreases by a factor of about 4).
It's not ready to commit yet, but I've got it passing the regression tests, and I find that it runs the 'numeric' test about a factor of five faster than CVS tip; so it seems worth doing. A couple questions for the group: 1. Has anyone got a problem with changing the on-disk representation of NUMERIC for 7.4? The only objection I can think of is that it'd prevent "pg_upgrade" from working ... but we don't have pg_upgrade capability right now anyway, and I've not heard that anyone is planning to make it happen for 7.4. 2. The numeric regression test probably isn't a good benchmark for this, since it spends most of its time pushing around numerics with hundreds of digits. I doubt that's representative of common usage. Can anyone offer a more real-world benchmark test? regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to [EMAIL PROTECTED])