Arithmetic Bit-Shifting

Posted March 12, 2019 by James Knicely, Vertica Field Chief Technologist

white cloud in vault type room representing cloud computing
A fun way to manipulate bits in Vertica SQL is with the use of arithmetic bit-shifting, which moves the bits in a number either left or right and fills in the new values with 0s.

Bit-shifting left is an easy way to multiply by powers of 2, while bit-shifting right divides by powers of 2.

Example: dbadmin=> SELECT 5 << 2 "5*4="; 5*4= ------ 20 (1 row) dbadmin=> SELECT 20 >> 2 "20/4="; 20/4= ------- 5 (1 row) Helpful Link: https://www.vertica.com/docs/latest/HTML/Content/Authoring/SQLReferenceManual/LanguageElements/Operators/BitwiseOperators.htm