On 03/28/2013 07:43 AM, Gavan Schneider wrote:
Personally I have ignored the money type in favour of numeric. Money seemed to do too much behind the scenes for my taste, but, that's me being lazy as well, I haven't spend much time trying to understand its features.
You're not the only one. In the financial industry, we can't even use the money type for a few reasons:
1. It's very common for values to have fractional amounts in the selected currency. Just look at gas stations... they could never use the Money type in the US thanks to the "3.989" pricing they commonly employ.
2. You can't use the Money type for non-local currencies. Our database may store transactions in several base currencies. Sure, the smart thing would be to save the exchange rate at the time of the transaction and store the local value and the rate, but then you'd have to reverse that calculation to get the original value, and without decimals, that conversion would be wrong in most cases.
So we use numeric. It's the only thing with the guaranteed precision we need, and prettying up the display is easy to do client-side. We're extremely happy to see the recent improvements in numeric performance that seem to be coming in 9.3. :)
-- Shaun Thomas OptionsHouse | 141 W. Jackson Blvd. | Suite 500 | Chicago IL, 60604 312-676-8870 sthomas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ______________________________________________ See http://www.peak6.com/email_disclaimer/ for terms and conditions related to this email -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
