[Wellington-pm] numeric types

[Richard Hector]

Hi all,

I'm having a play with a database that involves money.

It seems that the proper thing to do is to use SQL's 'numeric' type,
which from the Postgres docs will preserve whatever numbers I give it
perfectly - it looks like it will be saved in BCD or similar to achieve
that.

However, I'm not sure that's so useful if whenever I transfer between a
Perl program and my DB, I'm converting it to a floating point number.

I'm not even clear that that's what will happen; it seems difficult to
work out how Perl has actually stored a given value; perhaps DBI returns
it as a string, which I can match and stick into a more complex data
structure that preserves the components?

How do I know what's happening, and how do I ensure that I'm getting
what I want?

Thanks,

Richard