Re: Money data type - Deprecated?

On May 27, 2008, at 8:29 AM, Merlin Moncure wrote:
> On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 4:05 PM, Andrew Sullivan
> <ajs(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:
>> On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 03:46:39PM -0400, Justin wrote:
>>> Thats a good Question is the Money type ever going to die i
>>> believe it was
>>> deprecated several versions ago?
>>
>> I think it was undeprecated in 8.3 because someone (D'Arcy J.M.
>> Cain?)
>> made a bunch of changes to the datatype to make it more
>> currency-portable. Have a look in the release notes.
>
> Your summary is pretty much correct. The 'deprecated' moniker was for
> all intents and purposes removed when the range was expanded. For the
> record, I don't agree with this...IMO the money type is not really
> rigorous enough to be useful. It's missing tons of basic casts and is
> just plain weird. OTOH, it's a neat example of a fixed precision
> integer type.
>
> I personally think that it really belongs in contrib as an example of
> adding a new type...with all the money bits stripped off, as a
> strictly fixed precision integer.

I think what it really needs is currency information so that you can
tell if a value is in USD or something else. But it seems that every
time that's brought up, people want to start worrying about storing
conversion tables.
--
Decibel!, aka Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect decibel(at)decibel(dot)org
Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828