Sender: mark
Message-ID: <37E45D0F.C383CF2@plasticsoftware.com.au>
Date: Sun, 19 Sep 1999 13:48:31 +1000
From: Mark Lillywhite <mark@plasticsoftware.com.au>
Organization: Plastic Software
MIME-Version: 1.0
CC: pgsql-interfaces@postgreSQL.org
Subject: Re: [INTERFACES] JDBC: BigDecimal and Money confusion
References: <13336.937665011@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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Hi Tom,

> Mark Lillywhite <mark@plasticsoftware.com.au> writes:
> > (As an aside, I found the PGMoney class but it too only accepts doubles. I
> > could use doubleValue() on the BigDecimal but I am worried about the loss of
> > precision given my past experience. So my position is that I reckon I should
> > be able to use arbitrary precision up until the database interprets it).
>
> Mark, I dunno what Postgres version you are using, but there is a
> genuine arbitrary-precision-decimal NUMERIC type in Postgres 6.5 & up.
> That's probably what you should be using.  The old 'money' type is a
> hack, because it overflows too easily.  ($20 million ain't what it
> used to be ;-).)  It's now deprecated and will probably go away
> entirely at some point.

Thanks HEAPS for this, we were very confused about the numeric support because we
were reading the documentation which indicated that there *was* a numeric type,
but we were using the Postgres that comes on the RH6.0 CD, which is 6.4, and of
course we couldn't get it to work - but "money" worked fine. We upgraded to 6.5
but we didn't try the numeric type.

It's all just 'cos I'm new and don't know my way around the
documentation/changelogs/readmes etc yet.

Thanks again for your help, I guess my JDBC patch is kinda worthless then :)

Cheers
Mark