Data Types

The Data Cloud SQL type system includes two groups of types.

  • Atomic types that describe single values
  • Composite types that describe collections of values

Atomic types are basic data types. This table lists all available atomic types.

NameAliasesDescription
BIGINTINT8Signed eight-byte integer
BOOLEANBOOLBoolean value with ternary logic (true/false/unknown)
BYTESBinary data (“byte array”)
CHARACTER [ (n) ]CHAR [ (n) ]Fixed-length character string
CHARACTER VARYING (n)VARCHAR (n)Variable-length character string with limit
DATECalendar date (year, month, day)
REALFLOAT4Single-precision floating-point number (4 bytes)
DOUBLE PRECISIONFLOAT, FLOAT8Double-precision floating-point number (8 bytes)
INTEGERINT, INT4Signed four-byte integer
INTERVALTime span, not supported in Tableau
NUMERIC [ (p, s) ]DECIMAL [ (p, s) ]Exact numeric of selectable precision
SMALLINTINT2Signed two-byte integer
TEXTVariable-length character string
TIME [ WITHOUT TIME ZONE ]Time of day (no time zone)
TIMESTAMP [ WITHOUT TIME ZONE ]Date and time (no time zone)
TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONETIMESTAMPTZDate and time, including time zone
GEOGRAPHYA geography object

Persisting NUMERIC values into .hyper files with a precision greater than 18 by using Tableau Hyper API requires at least database version 3.

Persisting 32-bit floating point values into .hyper files by using Tableau Hyper API requires at least database version 4.

Composite types are collections of multiple data items in a single SQL value. You can use them for dedicated schema denormalization, which is useful for specific domains, such as machine learning applications. Data Cloud SQL supports the array composite type.

An array is an ordered sequence of values. Arrays in Data Cloud SQL are strongly typed and can be built from all supported atomic types. For more details, see Array Type.