On Fri, Sep 15, 2006 at 10:01:19AM +0100, Heikki Linnakangas wrote: > Gregory Stark wrote: > >It's limited but I wouldn't say it's very limiting. In the cases where it > >doesn't apply there's no way out anyways. A UTF8 field will need a length > >header in some form. > > Actually, you can determine the length of a UTF-8 encoded character by > looking at the most significant bits of the first byte. So we could > store a UTF-8 encoded CHAR(1) field without any additional length header.
Except in postgres the length of a datum is currently only determined from the type, or from a standard varlena header. Going down the road of having to call type specific length functions for the values in columns 1 to n-1 just to read column n seems like a really bad idea. We want to make access to later columns *faster* not slower, which means keeping to the simplest (code-wise) scheme possible. Have a nice day, -- Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> http://svana.org/kleptog/ > From each according to his ability. To each according to his ability to > litigate.
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