returned type inconsistency: COUNT(a) returns a string

[ged]

Original report by Anonymous.

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I've had this code, that worked as expected on localhost with sqlite3 but not on Heroku.

This query creates a recordset of how many records were created per day:

#!ruby

votes = Game.find(13).user_votes.select("user_votes.created_at, COUNT(user_votes.id) as count").order("user_votes.created_at ASC").group("user_votes.created_at")

Now if you check

#!ruby

votes[0].count.is_a?(Integer)
votes[0].count.as_a?(String)

with sqlite3 you will get true, false. But with PG, it'll be false, true.

[ged]

Original comment by Michael Granger (Bitbucket: ged, GitHub: ged).

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You're using some other library on top of 'pg', and it's that library's responsibility to do any conversion between PostgreSQL's columns and its equivalent Ruby datatype. The 'pg' library explicitly and intentionally doesn't do any datatype conversion of any column value in its result set, as different higher-level libraries have different ideas about what Ruby class and conversion mechanism is appropriate.

For more details on the design philosophy for low-level PostgreSQL client libraries, see the [[http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Driver_development|Driver Development article]] in the PostgreSQL wiki.