pgsql - storing timestamp out of bounds

[csn]

I was wondering what you'd do if you wanted to store a timestamp value that's outside of that data type's bounds (4713 BC - AD 5874897)?

[Sxooter]

I'd use a large numeric type and set 0 at some arbitrary point. PostgreSQL can handle numeric types hundreds or thousands of digits long. But they're not real fast. Kind of the trade off. Would a bigint be big enough to account for all the seconds/days/years you'd need? They'd likely be faster.

[csn]

I was just curious (might have to someday store the date when mysql actually implements all their promised features 😉 ).

Do you know how much slower numeric types are? The docs mention this, but I've never noticed any performance impact. Any idea why they're slower?

[chriskl]

They're slower because they're base-10000 infinite precision. It requires a lot of operations to do stuff that's very quick with native floats.