Problem with sqlite3 and Decimal

[Frank Millman]

"Frank Millman"  wrote in message news:n4gigr$f51$1 at ger.gmane.org...

> I have found a workaround for my problem, but first I needed to understand
> what was going on more clearly. This is what I have figured out.
>
[...]
>
> The reason for the '#' in the above function is that sqlite3 passes the
> current value of 'balance' into my function, and it has a bad habit of
> trying to second-guess the data-type to use. Even though I store it as a
> string, it passes in an integer or float. Prefixing it with a '#' forces
> it to remain as a string.

Well that theory did not last very long!

As soon as I applied this to my live app, I found that I am using the 
database to perform arithmetic all over the place - calculating tax, 
exchange rates, etc. I always round the result once it arrives from the 
database, so there was no rounding problem.

With the prefix of '#' the calculations all just crash, and return null 
values.

My new solution is to pass a 'scale' factor into my aggregate function. The 
function uses the Decimal quantize method to round the result before 
returning. So far it seems to be working.

Frank