Greg Stark <stark@mit.edu> writes:
> But I wonder if we could just declare that that's not what the scale typmod
> does. That it's just a maximum scale but it's perfectly valid for NUMERIC
> data with lower scales to be stored in a column than the typmod says. In a
> way the current behaviour is like bpchar but it would be nice if it was
> more like varchar
BTW, note that if you want varying scale in a column, you can declare it
as unconstrained "numeric". So that case corresponds to "text", whereas
as you rightly say, numeric(m,n) is more like bpchar(n). It's true there
is nothing corresponding to varchar(n), but how much do you really need
that case? The SQL standard didn't see fit to invent a variant of numeric
that worked that way, so they at least aren't buying it.
regards, tom lane