data storage question

Hi everyone,

I would like to take advantage of postgresql's ability to store arrays
within records, but I wanted to make sure that I store them in the most
efficient way so my performance is optimized. I want to store
one-dimensional arrays of float values, each with about 6000 elements. I
need to store about 6 of these in each row of the table--the table will
eventually have about 10,000 rows. Will using the float8[] data type be
fast, or should i create my own data type (I was thinking of packing the
array in perl, maybe).

Also, in using the float8[] data type, I have another question: how do i
take a column of an existing postgresql table, and place it in a record of
a new table with the data type float8[]? All of the examples involving
arrays in the documentation only show INSERT VALUES statements, and thus
I'm not sure of the syntax if I want to use select instead of values.

thanks!
Evan