Is it possible to store a 1 byte number in Postgres?

Question

I have 7 8-bit integer values per record that I want to store in Postgres. Pg doesn\'t offer a single byte integer type, SMALLINT, or 2 bytes, being the smallest integer datatyp

Answer 1

There is pg_catalog.char ( another notation - "char" ) type which uses only 1 byte to store its value.

select pg_column_size( 'A' );
pg_column_size
----------------
              2
(1 row)

select pg_column_size( 'A'::"char" );
pg_column_size
----------------
              1
(1 row)