Gunther Hagleitner created HIVE-4271:
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             Summary: Limit precision of decimal type
                 Key: HIVE-4271
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-4271
             Project: Hive
          Issue Type: Bug
            Reporter: Gunther Hagleitner
            Assignee: Gunther Hagleitner
         Attachments: HIVE-4271.1.patch

The current decimal implementation does not limit the precision of the numbers. 
This has a number of drawbacks. A maximum precision would allow us to:

- Have SerDes/filformats store decimals more efficiently
- Speed up processing by implementing operations w/o generating java BigDecimals
- Simplify extending the datatype to allow for decimal(p) and decimal(p,s)
- Write a more efficient BinarySortable SerDe for sorting/grouping/joining

Exact numeric datatype are typically used to represent money, so if the limit 
is high enough it doesn't really become an issue.

A typical representation would pack 9 decimal digits in 4 bytes. So, with 2 
longs we can represent 36 digits - which is what I propose as the limit.

Final thought: It's easier to restrict this now and have the option to do the 
things above than to try to do so once people start using the datatype.

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