On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 10:18 AM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Hugo Mercier <hugo.merc...@oslandia.com> writes: >> PostGIS functions that manipulate geometries have to unserialize their >> input geometries from the 'flat' varlena representation to their own, >> and serialize the processed geometries back when returning. >> But in such nested call queries, this serialization-unserialization >> process is just an overhead. > > This is a reasonable thing to worry about, not just for PostGIS types but > for many container types such as arrays --- it'd be nice to be able to > work with an in-memory representation that wasn't just a contiguous blob > of data. For instance, assignment to an array element might become a > constant-time operation even when working with variable-length datatypes.
I bet numeric could benefit as well. Essentially all of the operations on numeric start by transforming the on-disk representation into an internal form used only for the duration of a single call, and end by transforming the internal form of the result back to the on-disk representation. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
