Bitstring

Name	Aliases	Description
BITSTRING	BIT	Variable-length strings of 1s and 0s

Bitstrings are strings of 1s and 0s. The bit type data is of variable length. A bitstring value requires 1 byte for each group of 8 bits, plus a fixed amount to store some metadata.

By default bitstrings will not be padded with zeroes. Bitstrings can be very large, having the same size restrictions as BLOBs.

Creating a Bitstring

A string encoding a bitstring can be cast to a BITSTRING:

Query

SELECT '101010'::BITSTRING AS b;

Result

 b-------- 101010

Creating a BITSTRING with a predefined length is possible with the bitstring function. The resulting bitstring will be left-padded with zeroes.

Query

SELECT bitstring('0101011', 12) AS b;

Result

 b-------------- 000000101011

Numeric values (integer and float values) can also be converted to a BITSTRING via casting. For example:

Query

SELECT 123::BITSTRING AS b;

Result

 b---------------------------------- 00000000000000000000000001111011

Functions

See Bitstring Functions.