Re: GiST for range types (was Re: Range Types - typo + NULL string constructor)

On Fri, 2011-10-07 at 12:54 +0400, Alexander Korotkov wrote:

> The first thing caught my eye in existing GiST code is idea of
> subtype_float. float8 has limited precision and can't respresent, for
> example, varlena values good enough. Even if we have large int8 value
> we can loose lower bits, but data distribution can be so that these
> bits are valuable. Wouldn't it better to have function like
> subtype_diff_float which returns difference between two values of
> subtype as an float? Using of such function could make penalty more
> sensible to even small difference between values, and accordingly more
> relevant.
>
I started implementing subtype_diff, and I noticed that it requires
defining an extra function for each range type. Previously, the numeric
types could just use a cast, which was convenient for user-defined range
types.

If you have any other ideas to make that cleaner, please let me know.
Otherwise I'll just finish implementing subtype_diff.

Regards,
Jeff Davis