Re: Help Data-Types

>>Four integer columns?
>My first idea as well. Seems that nothing is lost by normalizing and a
>lot is gained...

Hey, why not 32 columns of type BIT ?!?.

>Then, enforsing constraints and querieng is the
>simplest of all. Alternatively, it could be just a single integer:
>
>a3*256^3+a2*256^2+a1*256^1+a0

Arrrgg. If you store them as 32bit INTEGERs you don't need no dam constraints!

> However textual representation seem cheaper (speed vs space costs)
>, faster (in most cases, since it is already formatted)

My betting is that a CPU can do bit shifts quicker that getting a 11 more bytes from RAM/disk

> Final digressions - does the following statement hold water?:
> For all proposed data types there exist semantics in which the
> proposed data type is the better then all other.

With a DBMS that supports multiple possible representations (of DataTypes) one does not need to choose between different representation at the logical level.
With multiple possible representations available at the physical level, the decision of which representation (or representations) to use is relegated to the usual performance trade-offs between the different representations.

Regards
Paul Vernon
Business Intelligence, IBM Global Services Received on Mon Aug 19 2002 - 15:40:27 CEST