Consistency and Data Type Behavior
Explore how PostgreSQL implements dynamic data type behavior and operator dispatch to manage query consistency. Learn about PostgreSQL catalogs, index support for data types, and how serialization affects data handling. This lesson deepens your understanding of data type interactions and indexing mechanisms for smarter database use.
Data type behavior
A key aspect of PostgreSQL data types lies in their behavior. Comparable to an object-oriented system, PostgreSQL implements functions and operator polymorphism, allowing for the dispatching of code at runtime depending on the types of arguments.
The data type of a literal
If we take a closer look at a very simple SQL query, we can see lots happening under the hood:
In this query, the expression driverid = 1 uses the = operator between a column name and a literal value. PostgreSQL knows from its catalogs that the driverid column is a bigint ...
It would give ...