devroom.io/drafts/2012-08-28-rails-migrations-decimal-precision-and-scale.md
Ariejan de Vroom dbae98c4c0 Moar updates
2013-03-24 14:27:51 +01:00

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Rails migrations: decimal precision and scale article rails-migrations-decimal-precision-and-scale 2012-08-28
Rails
migrations
postgresql

I'm always confused when using decimal in a Rails migration. Normally I need to store a value that has 2 or 3 numbers behind the comma (or dot), or decimals.

Let's say you have a Product model with a discount_percentage attribute. This attribute is currently an integer, only allowing non-decimal values. To allow 2 digit decimal values (e.g. 12.54), you can mak the following migration:

:::ruby
change_column :products, :discount_percentage, :decimal, precision: 5, scale: 2

This will allow you to store values like 80.00, 99.99 and 100.00. There are five digits in the entire number and of those five, two decimals.

It's not necessary so specify precision and scale as your database will then allow any decimal value it can store.

Read more about the decimal data type in PostgreSQL here: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/datatype-numeric.html