Postgres real rounds to 4 decimal places

Question

I have a column latitude of type real in my Postgres table.

Looking at it in Postico, it has the value of 57.70887. But selecting it from psql or via code, the value returned is rounded to 4 decimal places:

# SELECT latitude from categories where id = 4;

 latitude
----------
  57.7089
(1 row)

What am I doing wrong?

Postgres 9.6.

@a_horse_with_no_name Thank you, that is correct. SET extra_float_digits = 3; ➜ select .. ➜ 57.7088699. I'll accept it if you post it as an answer :) — Markus Hedlund
– Markus Hedlund, Commented Mar 16, 2018 at 10:18
@Znarkus just a off topic hint: if you're storing latitudes, I assume you're dealing with longitudes too ;-) so I would really recommend you to use the postgis extension for storing points. I might seem in the beginning a bit unnecessary, but when spatial queries are involved, it can absolutely save you a lot of trouble. Cheers :-) — Jim Jones
– Jim Jones, Commented Mar 16, 2018 at 11:25

Erwin Brandstetter · Accepted Answer · 2018-03-16 12:17:09Z

0

The column should not be real if you care for precision. Floating point types only store approximate values. Use numeric instead to preserve the value exactly as inserted.

Consider:

edited Mar 16, 2018 at 12:17

answered Mar 16, 2018 at 12:11

Erwin Brandstetter

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