Re: Since '2001-09-09 01:46:40'::timestamp microseconds are lost when extracting epoch

On Mon, May 25, 2020 at 09:43:32AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Peter Eisentraut <peter(dot)eisentraut(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> > One problem (other than perhaps performance, tbd.) is that this would no
> > longer allow processing infinite timestamps, since numeric does not
> > support infinity. It could be argued that running extract() on infinite
> > timestamps isn't very useful, but it's something to consider explicitly.
>
> I wonder if it's time to fix that, ie introduce +-Infinity into numeric.c.
> This isn't the first time we've seen issues with numeric not being a
> superset of float, and it won't be the last.
>
> At first glance there's no free bits in the on-disk format for numeric,
> but we could do something by defining the low-order bits of the header
> word for a NaN to distinguish between real NaN and +/- infinity.
> It looks like those bits should reliably be zero right now.

+1 for adding +/- infinity to NUMERIC.

Best,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778

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