Gunther Hagleitner created HIVE-4271: ----------------------------------------
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. -- This message is automatically generated by JIRA. If you think it was sent incorrectly, please contact your JIRA administrators For more information on JIRA, see: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira