What are your thoughts on this? I’m working on integrating some new data that’s in a tab-delimited text format, and all of the decimal columns are kept as single integers; in order to determine the decimal amount you need to multiply the number by .01. It does this for things like percentages, weight and pricing information. For example, an item’s price is expressed as 3259 in the data files, and when I want to display it I would need to multiply it in order to get the ‘real’ amount of 32.59.
Do you think this is a good or bad idea? Should I be keeping my data structure identical to the one provided by the vendor, or should I make the database columns true decimals and use SSIS or some sort of ETL process to automatically multiply the integer columns into their decimal equivalent? At this point I haven’t decided if I am going to use an ORM or Stored Procedures or what to retrieve the data, so I’m trying to think long term and decide which approach to use. I could also easily just handle this in code from a DTO or similar, something along the lines of:
public class Product { // ... private int _price; public decimal Price { get { return (this._price * .01); } set { this._price = (value / .01); } } } But that seems like extra and unnecessary work on the part of a class. How would you approach this, keeping in mind that the data is provided in the integer format by a vendor that you will regularly need to get updates from.
‘Do you think this is a good or bad idea?’
Bad.
‘Should I be keeping my data structure identical to the one provided by the vendor?’
No.
‘Should I make the database columns true decimals?’
Yes.
It’s so much simpler to do what’s right. Currently, the data is transmitted with no ‘.’ to separate the whole numbers from the decimals; that doesn’t any real significance.
The data is decimal. Decimal math works. Use the decimal math provided by your language and database. Don’t invent your own version of Decimal arithmetic.