Storing a great many fields in a database

[Peter M. Brigham]

On Jul 16, 2012, at 3:07 PM, Dr. Hawkins wrote:

>> As you noted, using REAL for currency arithmetic will get
>> you into rounding issues but sounds like that's not a problem.  One
>> approach I've seen for currency values is to store them as integers
>> including the decimal places, e.g $100.00 would be stored as 10000, do the
>> arithemtic in that form, then insert the decimal point for display
>> purposes.
> 
> Actually working with the pennies, desirable as it would be, creates
> new issues--displaying in livecode fields.  I think it will be simpler
> to store in pennies, and convert to dollars while working, and back on
> save.

For his entire life, my father kept the running balances in his checkbook register in whole dollar amounts only, rounding each time he re-totaled. At the end of the year he was off by at most $2, usually accurate to the nearest dollar. In certain contexts, ignoring the small change doesn't matter at all for the big picture.

-- Peter

Peter M. Brigham
pmbrig at gmail.com
http://home.comcast.net/~pmbrig