Re: Weird problem with aggregate functions

"Andrea Aime" <aaime(at)comune(dot)modena(dot)it> writes:
> Thanks, it works!!! But why doesn't it work without the
> cast? This is a good workaround, but the standard behaviour
> is a bug, isn't it?

No, it isn't. We *used* to return int4 as the result of sum(int4),
etc, but that tends to suffer from overflow. And the deficiency of
using int4 as the result of avg() should be pretty obvious ;-)

The SQL spec says that we can use any exact numeric datatype we please
for these functions:

b) If SUM is specified and DT is exact numeric with scale
S, then the data type of the result is exact numeric with
implementation-defined precision and scale S.

c) If AVG is specified and DT is exact numeric, then the data
type of the result is exact numeric with implementation-
defined precision not less than the precision of DT and
implementation-defined scale not less than the scale of DT.

From what I've heard, VB simply does not recognize Postgres' NUMERIC
datatype at all. I don't know if that's VB's fault or a problem in
our ODBC driver.

regards, tom lane