On 27 Apr 2015, at 9:35pm, Jim Callahan <jim.callahan.orlando at gmail.com> wrote:
> But, even so, I would expect that users of complex numbers would be an > extremely small subset of data base users (less than 5%? or even less than > 1%?). Right. There's no way to know this for sure, but I suspect that of the literally billions of installations of SQLite, 99% all of them need only INTEGER, REAL and TEXT. Not even NULL. Of the ones which store two-number values, most of them are in SatNav units and store latitude and longitude rather than real and imaginary parts. And of the <1% who store complex numbers, many users are like the OP of this thread and just need them stored and retrieved. They don't need access/searching/sorting of individual values. So storing TEXT serialisations the values, even of arrays of values, is faster, involves no loss of precision, and leads to less disk space being used. Right now I'm manipulating data with Red Green Blue and White values. If SQLite had an appropriate type I'd use it, but it doesn't, and I'm happy storing the four values in one TEXT column, JSON style. My laptop and SSD are so ridiculously fast that, for example, extracting a Blue value from a stored column happens at a speed I find easy to accept. Simon.
