Help about SERIAL8 data types

Hello ; Could you explain to me what is SERIAL8 informix data types and is it available in Informix SE product ? Thanks for your reply ! Cheers -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Jean-Philippe BATTU Phone : (33) 04 76 29 73 43 Database Competence Center Fax : (33) 04 76 29 75 18 Mail : jean-philippe.battu@bull.net Bull, ISD/ICS/DB Solution Center PC:B1/382 01 Rue de Provence B.P. 208 38432 Echirolles FRANCE ---------------------------------------------------------------------

In the year of Our Lord Thu, 11 Jan 2001 10:00:13 +0100, Jean-Philippe BATTU <jean-philippe.battu@bull.net> broke a vow of silence to utter: >Could you explain to me what is SERIAL8 informix data types >and is it available in Informix SE product ? It's an 8-byte SERIAL, and no it isn't.

Obnoxio The Clown wrote: > In the year of Our Lord Thu, 11 Jan 2001 10:00:13 +0100, Jean-Philippe BATTU > <jean-philippe.battu@bull.net> broke a vow of silence to utter: > > >Could you explain to me what is SERIAL8 informix data types > >and is it available in Informix SE product ? > > It's an 8-byte SERIAL, and no it isn't. It's a 10-byte hit on your disk space that stores an 8-byte signed integer and otherwise behaves like a classic 4-byte SERIAL column on steroids, rather like an INT8 is a 10-byte hit on your disk space that stores an 8-byte signed integer... No, I do not understand *why* they chose to use 10 bytes for the on-disk representation; it is, IMNSHO, a gross mistake. It is bad enough having the int8_t structure -- which might even be necessary on machines without 64-bit integers -- but actually storing the data in the same format makes a mockery of the efforts that went into the on-disk format for DECIMAL, which is both highly compressed and sortable using basic character sorting. You don't believe me? Try: CREATE TABLE t(s8 SERIAL8 NOT NULL); SELECT tabname, rowsize FROM "informix".systables WHERE TabName = "t"; -- Yours, Jonathan Leffler (Jonathan.Leffler@Informix.com) #include <disclaimer.h> Guardian of DBD::Informix v1.00.PC1 -- http://www.perl.com/CPAN "I don't suffer from insanity; I enjoy every minute of it!"

Jonathan Leffler wrote: > It's a 10-byte hit on your disk space that stores an 8-byte signed > integer and otherwise behaves like a classic 4-byte SERIAL column on > steroids, rather like an INT8 is a 10-byte hit on your disk space that > stores an 8-byte signed integer... Is there a syssteroids table in sysmaster ?