PostgreSQL Data Types: Byte, Numeric, Character, Binary

PostgreSQL offers a rich set of native data types for users. Users can add new types with the help of CREATE TYPE command. It also makes queries simpler and more readable.

Data Types in PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL supports the following data types:

  • Text Types
  • Numeric Types
  • Dates and Times
  • XML
  • JSON
  • Boolean
  • Bits
  • Binary Data
  • Network
  • Arrays
  • Create your Data Type
  • Boolean
  • Temporal
  • UUID
  • Array
  • JSON
  • Special Data types for storing a network address and geometric data.

Let’s study PostgreSQL data types in detail

Character Datatypes

PostgreSQL supports character data types for storing text values. PostgreSQL builds character data types off of the same internal structures. PostgreSQL offers three character data types: CHAR(n), VARCHAR(n), and TEXT.

Name Description
varchar(n) Allows you to declare variable-length with a limit
Char(n) Fixed-length, blank padded
Text Use can use this data type to declare a variable with unlimited length

Numeric Datatypes

PostgreSQL supports two distinct types of numbers:

  • Integers
  • Floating-point numbers
Name Store size Range
smallint 2 bytes -32768 to +32767
integer 4 bytes -2147483648 to +2147483647
bigint 8 bytes -9223372036854775808 to 9223372036854775807
decimal variable If you declared it as decimal datatype ranges from 131072 digits before the decimal point to 16383 digits after the decimal point
numeric variable If you declare it as the number, you can include number up to 131072 digits before the decimal point to 16383 digits after the decimal point
real 4 bytes 6 decimal digits precision
double 8 bytes 15 decimal digits precision

Binary Data Types

A binary string is a sequence of octets or bytes. Binary Postgres Data Types are divided in two ways.

  • Binary strings allow storing odds of value zero
  • Non- printable octets

Character strings not allow zero octets and also disallows any other octet values and sequences which are invalid as per the database’s character set encoding rules.

Name Storage size Description
Byte 1 to 4 bytes plus the size of the binary string Variable-length binary string

Network Address Type

Many applications store network information like IP addresses of users or sensors. PostgreSQL has three native types which help you to optimize the network data.

Name Size Description
cider 7 or 19 bytes IPV4 and IPv6 networks
Inet 7 or 19 bytes IPV4 and IPV5 host and networks
macaddr 6 bytes MAC addresses

Using Network Address Types has following advantages

  1. Storage Space Saving
  2. Input error checking
  3. Functions like searching data by subnet

Text Search Type

PostgreSQL provides two data types which are designed to support full-text search. Full-text search is searching through a collection of natural-language documents to search those that best match a query.

  • Tsvector text search PostgreSQL variable types represent a document in a form optimized for text search
  • The query type text search stores the keywords that need to be searched

Date/Time Datatypes

PostgreSQL timestamp offers microsecond precision instead of second precision. Moreover, you also have the option of storing with timezone or without. PostgreSQL will convert timestamp with timezone to UTC on input and store it.

Date and time input is accepted in various formats, including traditional Postgres, ISO 8601. SQL-compatible etc.

PostgreSQL supports Day / Month / Year ordering. Formats supported are DMY, MDY, YMD

Temporal Data Types

Name Size Range Resolution
Timestamp without timezone 8 bytes 4713 BC to 294276 AD 1microsecond/14 digits
Timestamp with timezone 8 bytes 4713 BC to 294276 AD 1microsecond/14 digits
date 4 bytes 4713 BC to 294276 AD One day
Time without timezone 8 bytes 00:00:00 to 24:00:00 1microsecond/14 digits
Time with timezone 12 bytes 00:00:00 + 1459 to 24:00:00-1459 1microsecond/14 digits
Interval 12 bytes -178000000 to 178000000 years 1microsecond/14 digits

Examples

Input Description
2025-09-07 ISO 8601, September 7 with any date style (recommended format)
September 7, 2025 September 7 with any date style
9/7/2025 September 7 with MDY, July 9 with DMY
9/7/25 September 7, 2025, with MDY
2025-Sep-7 September 7 with any date style
Sep-7-2018 September 7 with any date style
7-Sep-25 September 7, 2025, with YMD
20250907 ISO 8601,7 Sep 20225 in any mode
2025.250 year and day of the year, in this case, Sep 7, 2025
J25250 Julian date

Time/ Time with Time Zone Input

Input Description
11:19:38.507
11:19:38
11:19
111938
ISO 8601
11:19 AM Same as 11:19
11:19 PM same as 23:19
23:19-3
23:19-03:00
231900-03
ISO 8601, same as 11:19 PM EST
23:19 EST time zone specified as EST, same as 11:19 PM EST

Boolean Type

A Boolean data type can hold

  • True
  • False
  • null

values.

You use a bool or boolean keyword to declare a column with the Boolean data type.

When you insert values into a boolean column, Postgre converts values like

  • Yes
  • y
  • 1
  • t
  • true

into 1.

While values like

  • No
  • N
  • 0
  • F
  • False

are converted to 0

While selecting data, the values are again converted back to yes, true, y, etc.

Geometric Data Types

Geometric data types represent two-dimensional spatial objects. They help perform operations like rotations, scaling, translation, etc.

Name Storage Size Representation Description
Point 16 bytes Point on a plane (x,y)
Line 32 bytes Infinite line ((xl.yl ).(x2.y2))
Lseg 32 bytes Finite line segment ((xl.yl ).(x2.y2))
Box 32 bytes Rectangular Box ((xl.yl ).(x2.y2))
Path 16n + 16n bytes Close and Open Path ((xl.yl),…)
Polygon 40 + 16n bytes Polygon [(xl.yl)….]
Circle 24 bytes Circle <(x.y).r> (center point and radius)

Enumerated Types

Enumerated PostgreSQL data type is useful for representing rarely changing information such as country code or branch id. The Enumerated data type is represented in a table with foreign keys to ensure data integrity.

Example

Hair color is fairly static in a demographic database

CREATE TYPE hair_color AS ENUM
('brown','black','red','grey','blond')

Enumerated Types

Range Type

Many business applications require data in ranges. Typically, two columns (example: start date, end date) are defined to deal with ranges. This is both inefficient and difficult to maintain.

Postgre has built range types as follows

  • int4range — Display range of integer
  • int8range — Display range of bigint
  • numrange — Shows the numeric range
  • tstrange — Helps you to display timestamp without time zone
  • strange — Allows you to display timestamp with time zone
  • date range — Range of date

UUID type

Universally Unique Identifies (UUID) is a 128-bit quantity which is generated by an algorithm. It is very unlikely that the same identifier will be generated by another person in the world using the same algorithm. That’s why for the distributed systems, these identifiers are an ideal choice as it offers uniqueness within a single database. A UUID is written as a group of lower-case hexadecimal digits, with various groups separated by hyphens.

PostgreSQL has a native UUID data type which consumes 16 bytes of storage.. UUID is an ideal Data type for primary keys.

Example

d5f28c97-b962-43be-9cf8-ca1632182e8e

Postgre also accepts alternative forms of UUID inputs like all capital case, no hyphens, braces, etc.

XML type

PostgreSQL allows you to store XML data in a data type, but it is nothing more than an extension to a text data type. But the advantage is that it checks that the input XML is well-formed.

Example

XMLPARSE (DOCUMENT '<?xml version="1.0"?><tutorial><chapter>Data Type</chapter><chapter>...</chapter></tutorial>')

JSON Type

To store JSON data PostgreSQL offers 2 data types

  1. JSON
  2. JSONB
json Jsonb
A simple extension of a text data type with JSON validation A binary representation of the JSON data
Insert is fast but data retrieval is relatively slow. Insert is slow but select (data retrieval is fast)
Saves inputted data exactly the way it is including whitespace. Supports indexing. May optimize the whitespace to make retrieval faster.
Reprocessing on data retrieval No reprocessing required on data retrieval

Most widely used JSON data type used us jsonb unless there is some specialized need to use JSON data type.

Example

CREATE TABLE employee (
  id integer NOT NULL,
  age  integer NOT NULL,
  data jsonb
);

INSERT INTO employee VALUES (1, 35, '{"name": "Tom Price", "tags": ["Motivated", "SelfLearner"], "onboareded": true}'); 

Pseudo-Types

PostgreSQL has many special-purpose entries that are called pseudo-types. You can’t use pseudo-types as PostgreSQL column types. There are used to declare or function’s argument or return type.

Each of the available pseudo-types is helpful in situations where a function’s behavior docs do not correspond to simply taking or returning a value of a specific SQL data type.

Name Description
Any Function accepts all input data type.
An array The function accepts any array data type.
Any element The function accepts any data type.
Any enum The function accepts any enum data type.
Nonarray The function accepts any non-array data type.
Cstring Function accepts or returns null-terminated C string.
Internal Internal function accepts or returns server-internal data type.
Language_handler It is declared to return language handler.
Record Find a function which returns an unspecified row type.
Trigger A trigger function is used to return trigger.

It is important that the user who is using this function need to make sure that the function will behave securely when a pseudo-type is used as an argument type.

Best practices using Data types

  • Use “text” data type unless you want to limit the input
  • Never use “char.”
  • Integers use “int.” Use bigint only when you have really big numbers
  • Use “numeric” almost always
  • Use float in PostgreSQL if you have IEEE 754 data source

Summary

  • PostgreSQL offers a rich set of native data types for users
  • PostgreSQL supports character data types for storing text values
  • PostgreSQL supports two distinct types of numbers: 1. Integers, 2. Floating-point numbers
  • A binary string is a sequence of bytes or octets
  • PostgreSQL has Network address type to help you optimize storage of network data
  • Text search PostgreSQL data structures are designed to support full-text search
  • Date/Time PSQL data types are allow date and time information in various formats
  • Boolean Postgres field types can hold three values 1. True 2. False 3. Null
  • Geometric PostgreSQL data types represent two-dimensional spatial objects
  • Enumerated Data types in PostgreSQL is useful for representing rarely changing information such as country code or branch id
  • Universally Unique Identifies (UUID) is a 128-bit quantity which is generated by an algorithm
  • PostgreSQL has many special-purpose entries that are called pseudo-types
  • It is best practice to use “text” data type unless you want to limit the input