Lately there have been couple of discussions on IRC, Slack, and Reddit that showed that people assume that by using int4/integer they use 4 bytes less than they would in case of int8/bigint. This is not really the case. Let me explain why.
Continue reading How much disk space you can save by using INT4/INT instead of INT8/BIGINT?
The general knowledge is that numerics are slower than integers/float, but offer precision and ranges that are better.
While I understand what is slow, I don't really know how much slower numerics are. So let's test it.
Yesterday I wrote about selects on int4 vs. texts.
One of the comments that caught my attention was question about index creation time. So, let's see…
There is this idea that normal form in databases require you to use integer, auto incrementing, primary keys.
The idea was discussed by many people, I will just point you to series of three blog posts on the subject by Josh Berkus ( part 1, 2 and 3, and reprise).
One of the points that proponents of surrogate keys (i.e. those based on integer and sequences) raise is that comparing integers is faster than comparing texts. So,
SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = 123
is faster than
SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = 'depesz'
Is it?
On 4th of December Peter Eisentraut committed patch by Pavel Stehule (with Peters tweaks) which adds default values for function arguments:
Default values for function arguments Pavel Stehule, with some tweaks by Peter Eisentraut
Continue reading Waiting for 8.4 – Default values for function arguments + integer in any base