Manipulating Distinct Types

When you compare or manipulate data of a distinct type and its source type, you must explicitly cast one type to the other in the following situations:

• To insert or update a column of one type with values of the other type
• To use a relational operator to add, subtract, multiply, divide, compare, or otherwise manipulate two values, one of the source type and one of the distinct type

For example, suppose you create a distinct type, dist_type, that is based on the NUMERIC data type. You then create a table with two columns, one of type dist_type and one of type NUMERIC.

CREATE DISTINCT TYPE dist_type AS NUMERIC;
CREATE TABLE t(col1 dist_type, col2 NUMERIC);

To directly compare the distinct type and its source type or assign a value of the source type to a column of the distinct type, you must cast one type to the other, as the following examples show:

INSERT INTO tab (col1) VALUES (3.5::dist_type);

SELECT col1, col2 
   FROM t WHERE (col1::NUMERIC) > col2;

SELECT col1, col2, (col1 + col2::dist_type) sum_col 
   FROM tab;

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