Re: best way to handle enum type

Tom Hart wrote:
> Tom Hart wrote:
> > Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> >> Tom Hart wrote:
> >>
> >>> Hey everybody. I have a field that, in my earlier mySQL days would have
> >>> been an enum('q','y','m','c'), and I'm wondering what's the best way to
> >>> handle this in pgsql.
> >>>
> >>
> >> If it's an option, upgrade to 8.3 and use the new enum support.
> > Oops, I think I just got caught not doing my homework :-) Thanks for
> > being nice about it Peter.
> >
> > I don't think I'll be able to convince my supervisor to install a beta
> > while we're still developing the system, but once it becomes more
> > stable (both my system and 8.3) then it's definitely something we'll
> > look at.
> >
> > Thanks for your reply.
> On a side note, I was just reading through the 8.3 changelog, (where I
> read about the enum datatype) and I noticed this line
>
> *
>
> Widen the MONEY data type to 64 bits (D'Arcy Cain)
>
> This greatly increases the range of supported MONEY values.
>
> I may be mistaken, but when I started developing this system (a data
> mine for a financial institution) I was told that the money datatype was
> deprecated and should not be used. Is this datatype still being worked
> on, and would it be viable to use in my development, as it is currently
> or in preparation for 8.3?

Uh, yea, we did discuss this during 8.3 development, and you will see in
the 8.3 docs that MONEY is no longer marked as depricated.

http://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/sgml/datatype-money.html

Basically MONEY had some major limitations but now someone is working on
improve it so we probably will keep it.

We still have these TODO items for MONEY:

* Add locale-aware MONEY type, and support multiple currencies

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2005-08/msg01432.php
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2007-03/msg01181.php

* MONEY dumps in a locale-specific format making it difficult to
restore to a system with a different locale

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://postgres.enterprisedb.com

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