Currently PostgreSQL only has trigonometric functions that work in radians. I think it would be quite useful to have an equivalent set of functions that worked in degrees. In other environments these are commonly spelled sind(), cosd(), etc.
Partly, this would be a matter of convenience. It's quite common to have a problem domain where angles are specified in degrees, and it's somewhat cumbersome having to type things like sin(radians(x)) and degrees(asin(x)).
Additionally, functions that worked natively in degrees would be able to return exact answers in special cases like cosd(90) = 0, whereas cos(radians(90)) is not exactly 0 because pi/2 cannot be represented exactly as a floating point number.
That is important.
Possibly the earthdistance module would benefit from these functions too.
Thoughts?
+1, yes, please.
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Simon Riggs http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services