Re: xlog location arithmetic

On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 1:00 PM, Euler Taveira de Oliveira
<euler(at)timbira(dot)com> wrote:
> On 06-12-2011 13:11, Robert Haas wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 5:14 AM, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
>>> I've been considering similar things, as you can find in the archives,
>>> but what I was thinking of was converting the number to just a plain
>>> bigint, then letting the user apply whatever arithmetic wanted at the
>>> SQL level. I never got around to acutally coding it, though. It could
>>> easily be extracted from your patch of course - and I think that's a
>>> more flexible approach. Is there some advantage to your method that
>>> I'm missing?
>>
>> I went so far as to put together an lsn data type.  I didn't actually
>> get all that far with it, which is why I haven't posted it sooner, but
>> here's what I came up with.  It's missing indexing support and stuff,
>> but that could be added if people like the approach.  It solves this
>> problem by implementing -(lsn,lsn) => numeric (not int8, that can
>> overflow since it is not unsigned), which allows an lsn => numeric
>> conversion by just subtracting '0/0'::lsn.
>>
> Interesting approach. I don't want to go that far. If so, you want to change
> all of those functions that deal with LSNs and add some implicit conversion
> between text and lsn data types (for backward compatibility). As of int8, I'm
> not aware of any modern plataform that int8 is not 64 bits. I'm not against
> numeric use; I'm just saying that int8 is sufficient.

The point isn't that int8 might not be 64 bits - of course it has to
be 64 bits; that's why it's called int8 i.e. 8 bytes. The point is
that a large enough LSN, represented as an int8, will come out as a
negative values. int8 can only represent 2^63 *non-negative* values,
because one bit is reserved for sign.

--
Robert Haas
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