Re: Storing real *large* integer values - ideas?

barry_grove_at_mindlink.bc.ca (Barry P. Grove ) wrote:
>Hi,
>
>The approach I would use, would be to store the arbitrarily high preci
>sion integers in VARCHAR2
>fields; up to 2000 digits I believe, or else use LONGs. Then write my
> own SQL functions (in
>PL/SQL) to perform the addition, subtraction, multiplication, division
>, etc. I've code this
>problem before in 8086 assembler (about 16 years ago) and Pascal (14 y
>ears ago) using Donald
>Knuth's Seminumerical Algorithms (vol 2) as a reference. Refer to sec
>tion on "Multiple Precision
>Arithmetic". Also a search of the Web should yield some solutions: I
>used AltaVista to search for
>the key words and found many references.
>
>Hope this helps....
>
>--
>Barry P. Grove BCTEL (604)432-4468
>barry_grove_at_mindlink.bc.ca Human Resources Consul
>ting
>Developer, Oracle DBA, Unix Sysadmin 6-3777 Kingsway, Burna
>by, BC

Thanks Barry,
I was thinking along those lines, but was concerned about performance, i.e, this value would be the "unique identifier" for the transaction. Can I effectively index such as field? I am using ORACLE7 for NT.

Kevin

ps. I remember doing the 2000 factorial problem on a DEC PDP11/03 in *octal* using base 32767 ( the largest register size)!!

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* K. E. Fein                     "To thy own opinions be true...           *
* kfein_at_primenet.com               ...those expressed herein are but mine" *
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