> >This would have other uses as well, such as default report formats, so >we can store financial amounts as NUMERIC, but format them on >retrieval as $12,345.78 etc..
Nice idea, but what if you need to do further calculations? If you output the value of credit card transactions it works fine, but in case you want to SUM up the values, then you need to cast it back from text(?) to numeric, calculate it and cast it to text(?) again? And if you do - for any reason - need the credit card number in your application (for example sending it to the credit card company to deduct money) how can you retrieve it¹s original value? Moreover, if you SELECT from a sub-SELECT which already has the formatted information and not the plain data? Maybe you should restrict access to tables for a certain user and only allow the user to use a view which formats the output. Modern applications do have a presentation layer which should take care of data formatting. I am not sure if it is a good idea to mix data storage and data presentation in the database. Regards, Damian Wolgast (irc:asymetrixs) -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
