How useful is the money datatype?

[Thom Brown <thombrown@xxxxxxxxx>]

I've noticed that while you can perform various calculations on a column of type money, you can't use it or cast it as any other numeric type directly.  Furthermore, it appears that since the locale being applied to the type is cluster-wide, you would need an entirely different cluster if say you had 2 web applications that were intended to store monetary amounts from different locations.

Is there an advantage to a money data type over a NUMERIC(10,2) or just representing it in lowest denomination of currency with an integer?

I've found that I unwittingly compiled PostgreSQL on my web server without specifying locale, and now the money type is represented in dollars.  In order to change that, it would require a recompilation of PostgreSQL  (and I'm surprised that there is no option to set locale at the database-level in the same way as collation has for 8.4).

Having a look around the archives, there seem to be some fairly old discussions of possibly removing this data type, so is it fair to assume it's probably not beneficial to use it?

Thanks

Thom