I'm working with postgresql-9.1 recently.
For some reason I have to use a tech which does not support data type numeric but decimal. Unfortunately, the data type of columns which I've assigned decimal to them in my Postgresql are always numeric. I tried to alter the type, but it did not work though I've got the messages just like "Query returned successfully with no result in 12 ms".
SO, I want to know how can I get the columns to be decimal.
Any help will be highly appreciate.
e.g.
My creating clauses:
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS htest
(
dsizemin decimal(8,3) NOT NULL,
dsizemax decimal(8,3) NOT NULL,
hidentifier character varying(10) NOT NULL,
tgrade character varying(10) NOT NULL,
fdvalue decimal(8,3),
CONSTRAINT htest_pkey PRIMARY KEY (dsizemin , dsizemax , hidentifier , tgrade )
);
My altering clauses:
ALTER TABLE htest
ALTER COLUMN dsizemin TYPE decimal(8,3);
But it does not work.
In PostgreSQL, "decimal" is an alias for "numeric" which poses some problems when your app thinks it expects a type called "decimal" from the database. As Craig noted above, you can't even create a domain called "decimal"
There is no good workaround in the database side. The only thing you can do is change the application to expect a numeric data type back.
Use Numeric (precision, scale) to store decimals
precision represents the total number of expected digits on either side of the decimal point. scale is the number decimals you wish to store.
This Numeric (5,5) would imply you only want numbers less than 1 (negative or positive) with 5 decimal points. Debug, it may be Numeric (6,5) if the postgre sql errors out because it things the leading 0 is a decimal.
0.12345 would be an example of the above.
1.12345 would need a field Numeric (6,5)
100.12345 would need a field Numeric (8,5)
-100.12345 would need a field Numeric (8,5)
When you write a select statement to see the decimals, it rounds to 2; but if you do something like Select 100 * [field] from [table], then extra decimals should start appearing....
Related
Postgres (V11.3, 64bit, Windows) truncates trailing zeros for timestamps. So if I insert the timestamp '2019-06-12 12:37:07.880' into the table and I read it back as text postgres returns '2019-06-12 12:37:07.88'.
Table date_test:
CREATE TABLE public.date_test (
id SERIAL,
"timestamp" TIMESTAMP WITHOUT TIME ZONE NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT pkey_date_test PRIMARY KEY(id)
)
SQL command when inserting data:
INSERT INTO date_test (timestamp) VALUES( '2019-06-12 12:37:07.880' )
SQL command to retrieve data:
SELECT dt.timestamp ::TEXT FROM date_test dt
returns '2019-06-12 12:37:07.88'
Do you consider this a bug or a feature?
My real issue is: I´m running queries from a C++ program and I have to convert the data returned from the database to appropriate data types. Since the protocol is text-based everything I read from the database is plain text. When parsing timestamps I first tokenize the string and then convert each token to integer. And because the millisecond part is truncated, the last token is "88" instead of "880", and converting "88" yields another value that converting "880" to integer.
That's the default display format when using a cast to text.
If you want to see all three digits, use to_char()
SELECT to_char(dt.timestamp,'yyyy-mm-d hh24:mi:ss.ms')
FROM date_test dt;
will return 2019-06-12 12:37:07.880
It’s a matter of presentation only.
First note that 07.88 seconds and 07.880 seconds is the same amount of time (also 7.88 and 07.880000000 for that matter).
PostgreSQL internally represents a timestamp in a way that we shouldn’t be concerned about as long as it’s an unambiguous representation. When you retrieve the timestamp, it is formatted into some string. This is where PostgreSQL apparently chooses not to print redundant trailing zeros. So it’s probably not even correct to say that it truncates anything. It just refrains from generating that 0.
I think that the nice solution would be to modify your parser in C++ to accept any number of decimals and parse them correctly with and without trailing zeroes. Another solution that should work is given in the answer by a_horse_with_no_name.
I know someone asked the same question from PostgreSQL sum typecasting as a bigint a while ago, but I don't see it was answered. I am adding value of a column whose type is integer using sum function, but it will overflow when I adding two 1.5 billion. I want the sum result to be bigint. Is there anyway to achieve it? Thanks in advance. I tried following but didn't work.
sum(count)::bigint AS total
If I do as following I am still getting error
sum(count::bigint) AS total
Caused by: org.postgresql.util.PSQLException: ERROR: cannot change data type of column "total" from integer to numeric
You should cast before to sum it. That is:
sum(count::bigint) as total
In postgres sum(integer) and sum(bigint) are different functions which returns, respectively, integer and big integer.
In fact, all postgres functions are identified not only by its name but by the combination of its name and its argument types.
If you don't cast before, then you end up using integer version of sum() which always return integer. Even if you later cast it to bigint. If it's result is an overflow, you can't cast overflow to bigint.
EDIT: As abelisto rightly points, sum() yet returns bigint for smallint and integer. But, as I can see, your error message says that "cannot change type of column total from integer to numeric". But as far as I understand, "total" is the result of the whole operation, so it should be bigint (even if overflow).
...Not sure if it tries to point to the "count" column which (after operation) is labeled as "total" (but it stucks me...) or if it simply saying that it can't cast numeric to bigint (which seems more feasible to me). It depends of the actual type of count column. Is it already bigint or numeric?
If it is, the problem is probably in trying to cast as bigint a very huge numeric (of numeric type I mean) value.
Can you tell us the exact type of "count" colunm? And better than that: can you provide a failing example with a literal value?
Something like (but I only got an "bigint out of range" error...):
somedb=> with foo as (
select 1000000000 as a
union select 231234241234123
union select 99999999999999999999999
) select sum(a) from foo;
sum
--------------------------
100000000231235241234122
(1 row)
somedb=> with foo as (
select 1000000000 as a
union select 231234241234123
union select 99999999999999999999999
) select sum(a)::bigint from foo;
ERROR: bigint out of range
So i learned in my Sql course last week how to turn a string into an integer. the table we used for this was timezone based. so it was '-5' hours offset.
in order to do this we had to cast the string to a DECIMAL and then to an SMALLINT. It was pretty simple once I knew that , thats not where my question lies.
what im curious about is why a SMALLlNT wouldnt take a negative sign but A Decimal could do it. according to the specs a SMALLINT still can go to -32768. so does anyone know if this persists in all coding languages or is it just SQL specific? As well as what wont allow it to cast
I don't see why you would bother doing any casting to begin with? According to the documentation (see table 1/3 down the page), T-SQL supports implicit conversion between varchar and smallint.
DECLARE #negative_varchar VARCHAR(10) = '-5'
DECLARE #negative_smallint SMALLINT = CONVERT(SMALLINT, #negative_varchar)
DECLARE #negative_smallint_implicit SMALLINT = #negative_varchar
SELECT #negative_varchar, #negative_smallint, #negative_smallint_implicit
Produces
---------- ------ ------
-5 -5 -5
no this is what im saying (declare #s as nvarchar
#s=-5
(50) = CAST (#s AS SMALL INT)
again you have to cast from decimal then small int. im asking about the underlying code behind the process.
such as does one of the bytes hold whether a number is positive or negative etc...
select rtrim(char(PKG_AGR_IDR)),rtrim(char(STA_DTE))
from test FETCH FIRST 10 ROW ONLY
"0010000010. 2014-03-14"
"0010000010. 2014-03-14"
I need data as below:
0010000010 2014-03-14
I am planning to write a script to do rtrim(char(fieldname)) is there any combination of functions with which i can get proper output for both fields.
One might presume that the OP might have been written more like the following, to better describe the scenario:
Some background about what is being done will be included, such that later references [such as to field_name] will be previously-explained rather than having to be intuited by a reviewer.
The intention is to enable dynamically generating an SQL SELECT statement that will retrieve a character-representation of the data from the columns of a specified TABLE. Given the DDL create table THE_SCHEMA.TEST ( PKG_AGR_IDR NUMERIC(10, 0), STA_DTE DATE ) and given the following DML used to populate that TABLE with a sample-row insert into THE_SCHEMA.TEST VALUES(10000010. '2014-03-14'), what is desired is to obtain a result-set [limited to the first ten rows for the purpose of testing] that would include the data from each column [of the TABLE named TEST in THE_SCHEMA] as VARCHAR data, as produced from the following query that would have been generated from the metadata stored in the SYSCOLUMNS catalog VIEW:
select rtrim(char(PKG_AGR_IDR)),rtrim(char(STA_DTE))from testFETCH FIRST 10 ROW ONLY
The single expression generated as 'RTRIM(CHAR(' CONCAT COLUMN_NAME CONCAT '))' from the SYSCOLUMNS data, as seen twice in the query noted just prior, seems unable to provide desirable results when applied to a column-name irrespective the value of the DATA_TYPE of the COLUMN_NAME being formatted by that character-expression. Specifically, for example, the result of the dynamically generated query select RTRIM(CHAR(PKG_AGR_IDR)), RTRIM(CHAR(STA_DTE)) from THE_SCHEMA.TEST FETCH FIRST 10 ROW ONLY produces the following output:
0010000010. 2014-03-14
However the expected\desired output would be:
0010000010 2014-03-14
Is there any expression like RTRIM(CHAR(column_name)) that will function for all the columns in a TABLE, to obtain the data as character-string, regardless the data-type of the columns, whether they be numeric, varchar or date?
Yet even with that more complete description of the scenario\background:
The claims about what is the output from the original expression are unexpected from the CHAR scalar effecting Decimal to Character casting, at least for the DB2 for i SQL for which the zero-scale packed decimal (DECIMAL) and zoned decimal (NUMERIC) SQL data types are represented without a decimal separator [aka decimal point] despite the optional decimal-character as the second argument. As well the CHAR scalar omits leading zeroes when casting from numeric. Thus the DB2 for i SQL would have obtained a result of the string '10000010' rather than either of '0010000010.' or '10000010.'
I suppose the issue may be specific to the DB2 for Z or the DB2 LUW, and perhaps this topic was incorrectly tagged with DB2 for i? Or perhaps there may be a[n unstated] concern about an apparent incompatibility betwixt the DB2 variants? Yet having read the documentation, the described results seem contrary to what is documented, so I suspect the actual problem for the OP may be due to having encountered a defect [in whatever is the unstated variant of the DB2 and release level that is being used].?
I do not expect that there will be any one expression that will perform what is desired for each of NUMERIC, VARCHAR, and DATE [nor for each of INTEGER, SMALLINT, NUMERIC, DECIMAL, VARCHAR, and DATE]. For omission of the decimal point, the DB2 for i SQL is probably the most like what is expressed as desired, but then the leading zeroes are always trimmed http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/ssw_ibm_i_72/db2/rbafzscachar.htm
... Leading zeros are not returned. Trailing zeros are returned. If the scale of decimal-expression is zero, the decimal character is not returned. ...
The DB2 LUW SQL seems at least somewhat incoherent with regard to the topic of leading zeroes, as example 6 suggests none and then example 7 shows they are there, but like the above doc reference, clearly there should be no leading zero characters http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSEPGG_10.1.0/com.ibm.db2.luw.sql.ref.doc/doc/r0000777.html
... Leading zeros are not included. Trailing zeros are included. ... If the scale of decimal-expression is zero, the decimal character is not returned. ...
I did not research a DB2 for Z doc link.
I would expect that the solution will entail using a CASE expression, perhaps for the DATA_TYPE value. That is what I did coding something similar, though I just used VARCHAR casting scalar and did not do any trimming. However my requirement for CASE was not about keeping leading zero characters, instead mostly for choosing the correct decimal-separator character. And because the second argument decimal-character [for CHAR or VARCHAR] is disallowed for the INTEGER numeric types [sqlcode -171 aka SQL0171], the CASE expression for just the numeric types would be sufficiently resolved using just the following expression CASE WHEN DATA_TYPE IN ('INTEGER', 'SMALLINT', 'BIGINT') THEN ', ' concat DecSep concat ')' ELSE ')' appended to the 'VARCHAR(' concat where DecSep was the one-character variable having either the comma or period as the chosen decimal separator. Yet because the second argument [for CHAR or VARCHAR] is specific to the data type of the first argument, the character and date\time data types had their own CASE expression CASE WHEN DATA_TYPE IN ('DATE', 'TIME') THEN ', ' concat StdFmt concat ')' ELSE ')' appended to the 'VARCHAR(' concat where StdFmt was the three-character variable having one of the standards format specifications of ISO, USA, EUR, or JIS.
Not sure what you are asking. Remove double quotes? remove dot?
You can do a substr by providing the first and last position and also concatenate the two values.
select substr(trim(PKG_AGR_IDR), 2, 11) || ' ' || trim(char(STA_DTE))
from test FETCH FIRST 10 ROW ONLY
Thanks to a last minute client request a integer field in our database now needs to be a decimal, to two points.A value of 23 should become 23.00.
Is there a nice way I can convert the table and cast the data across?
I'll freely admit, I haven't done anything like this with PostgreSQL before so please be gentle with me.
Something like this should work:
alter table t alter column c type decimal(10,2);
Edit:
As #Oli stated in the comments; the first number is the entire length of the number (excluding the point) so the maxval for (10,2) would be 99999999.99
alter table table_name alter column columname type decimal(16,2);
for converting data type from int to decimal. with precession after decimal point 2 values it will come for example 10.285 then it will be 10.23.or in decimal place we can use numeric also it will work.