Re: [Gnumed-devel] Postgres: Removing trailing decimal zeroes from medication 'strengths'

[Karsten Hilbert]

On Thu, Sep 06, 2012 at 10:53:22AM +0000, Jim Busser wrote:

> Many of my medications acquired 'fake' precision, for example
> 
> 250.0 mg
> 
> but since the postgres documentation states that
> 
> Numeric values are physically stored without any extra leading or trailing 
> zeroes
> 
> such trailing zeros must have somewhere crept in… maybe in the days before we 
> implemented data packs (because mine do not contain trailing zeroes) and 
> perhaps I did not clean out previously existing values of ingredients which 
> maybe retained such trailing zeroes.
> 
> At any rate, I want to remove them because it is advised to NOT use trailing 
> zeroes (especially with hand-written prescriptions) because of the risk that
> 
> 250.0
> 
> could misread or misinterpreted as 2500.

Given the above explanation this may be considered a patient
safety issue. Hence I included, with the 1.2.4 release, a
fix for same.

The 17.4 database fixup will re-adjust all nnn.00... amounts
by dropping the "empty" scale. Any update or insert later on
will auto-drop any all-zero periodic decimal fractions. Thus
.00... should never get back in again.

Karsten
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