Fun new conundrum in dealing with data formats/displays in PostgreSQL! A client recently requested that we provide a data extract that included percentages as a three character number, left zero-padded, rather than a decimal/numeric. There’s not a great way in Postgres to show a numeric with leading zeros (actually, I’ve yet to find a data type that does this consistently as a built-in to any platform). Instead, you have to do a little bit of work to get to your end result as a character (or text) field. Continue reading