Colin Law wrote in post #970449: > On 24 December 2010 03:59, Marnen Laibow-Koser <[email protected]> > wrote: >> [...] >> I'm not sure Float has a proper use case at all. :) > > Consider table containing the masses of objects. Columns description > and mass (kg), with the following records > apple, 0.2 > earth, 5.9742E24 > sun, 1.98892E30 > super massive black hole, 1.0E39 > > What column type would be appropriate for storing the mass?
Irrelevant. If I understand you correctly, you're asking about DB column types, not Ruby column types. Anyway, the answer is: it depends. If I didn't need arbitrary precision, I'd store them as floats in the DB, and then change to BigDecimal before doing any math on them. If I did need arbitrary precision, and the DB didn't provide a BigDecimal-like type, I'd store them as strings. > > Colin Best, -- Marnen Laibow-Koser http://www.marnen.org [email protected] Sent from my iPhone -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.
