On 19.12.2012 11:56, Friedrich Röhrs wrote:
I don't understand why 1.6e-8 is absolutly necessary for sorting and comparison. PHP allows for the definition of custom sorting functions. If a custom datatype is defined, a custom sorting/comparision function can be defined too. Or am i missing some performance points?
We are talking about searching and sorting millions of data entries - doing that in PHP would be extremely slow and would take far more memory than we have. It has to be done natively in the database. So we have to use a data representation that can be natively compared and sorted by the database (at the very least by MySQL, but ideally, by many different database systems).
-- daniel