At 11:01 AM 6/13/2001 +0100, Ray Drew wrote:

>The behaviour of this release is that you _can_ define columns as pk's using
>a smallint or int data type and use generators to populate them. If the
>generated value exceeds the data type's limit then an error will result. So,
>if the genrator produces 32,768 for a column defined as smallint an error
>will occur. If your pk is never going to reach the data type's limit, there
>is no reason to use 8 bytes to store it, unless you want a bloated and slow
>database.
>
>Am I missing something?

Well, bloat is perhaps a bit strong. An INT64 holding a value less than
65576 takes only four bytes because of compression. The datatype of a
numeric value has no effect on indexing. People waste a great deal more
space by improper normalization than using large numerics.


Regards,

Ann
www.ibphoenix.com
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