Re: Let's drop two obsolete features which are bear-traps for novices

Am Sonntag, den 02.11.2014, 12:41 -0500 schrieb Tom Lane:
> BTW, after reflecting a bit more I'm less than convinced that this
> datatype is completely useless. Even if you prefer to store currency
> values in numeric columns, casting to or from money provides a way to
> accept or emit values in whatever monetary format the LC_MONETARY locale
> setting specifies. That seems like a useful feature, and it's one you
> could not easily duplicate using to_char/to_number (not to mention that
> those functions aren't without major shortcomings of their own).

As an additional datapoint, Vitesse Data changed the DB schema from
NUMERIC to MONEY for their TPCH benchmark for performance reasons: "The
modification to data types is easy to understand -- money and double
types are faster than Numeric (and no one on this planet has a bank
account that overflows the money type, not any time soon)."[1] And
"Replaced NUMERIC fields representing currency with MONEY"[2].

Not sure whether they modified/optimized PostgreSQL with respect to the
MONEY data type and/or how much performance that gained, so CCing CK Tan
as well.

Michael

[1] http://vitesse-timing-on.blogspot.de/2014/10/running-tpch-on-postgresql-part-1.html
[2] http://vitessedata.com/benchmark/

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