On 24 October 2015 at 05:24, Dean Rasheed <dean.a.rash...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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. -- Simon Riggs http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ <http://www.2ndquadrant.com/> PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services