Re: How to sum monetary variables

2011/7/18 Martín Marqués <martin.marques@gmail.com> > I'm building a table (which is a report that has to be printed) with a > bunch of items (up to 300 in some cases) that have unitary price > (stored in a numeric(9,2) field), how many there are, and the total > price for each item. At the end of the table there is a total of all > the items. > > The app is running on PHP and PostgreSQL is the backend. > > The question is, how do I get the total of everything? > > Running it on PHP gives one value, doing a sum() on the backend gives > another, and I'm starting to notice that even using python as a > calculator gives me errors (big ones). Right now I'm doing the maths > by hand to find out who has the biggest error, or if any is 100% > accurate. > > Any ideas? > Hi, I've not had issues with PostgreSQL when using the numeric data type. That said, when you need more precision than PHP's standard handling of floating points (http://php.net/manual/en/language.types.float.php), you can use PHP's BC Math functions to enforce arbitrary precision: http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.bc.php <http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.bc.php> Adam -- Nephtali: A simple, flexible, fast, and security-focused PHP framework http://nephtaliproject.com