Ack. I just realized I replied to you when I meant to reply to the sibling post, not yours. I'm sorry for the confusion. That solution uses a resolution of dates. If that meets your use-case, sure; if you need finer, the IO (and cache) burden grows with that.
Which is the narrowest pipe depends on your plumbing. My application-facing databases have 10 gigabit NICs, and narrower to the storage; I'm absolutely not network-constrained. I also don't really consider the size or shape of the data returned to the application a cost in the same sense I do the disk; application queries routinely denormalize the data into a less compact form. They presumably need the data in that format for a reason (even if that's simply the engineer's cognitive bandwidth).
It's also not a thing I'm generally in control of, so other than offering guidance, there's not a lot I can do about it.
Which is the narrowest pipe depends on your plumbing. My application-facing databases have 10 gigabit NICs, and narrower to the storage; I'm absolutely not network-constrained. I also don't really consider the size or shape of the data returned to the application a cost in the same sense I do the disk; application queries routinely denormalize the data into a less compact form. They presumably need the data in that format for a reason (even if that's simply the engineer's cognitive bandwidth).
It's also not a thing I'm generally in control of, so other than offering guidance, there's not a lot I can do about it.