# Postgresql – Efficiently comparing prices in different currencies

moneypostgresql

I want to make it possible for user to search products within a price range. User should be able to use any currency (USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, …), no matter what currency is set by the product. So, the product price is 200USD and, if the user searches the products that costs 100EUR – 200EUR, he still may find it. How to make it fast and effective?

Here is what I have done until now. I store the price, currency code and the calculated_price that is the price in Euros (EUR) that is the default currency.

CREATE TABLE "products" (
"id" serial,
"price" numeric NOT NULL,
"currency" char(3),
"calculated_price" numeric NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT "products_id_pkey" PRIMARY KEY ("id")
);

CREATE TABLE "currencies" (
"id" char(3) NOT NULL,
"modified" timestamp NOT NULL,
"is_default" boolean NOT NULL DEFAULT 'f',
"value" numeric NOT NULL,       -- ratio additional to the default currency
CONSTRAINT "currencies_id_pkey" PRIMARY KEY ("id")
);

INSERT INTO "currencies" (id, modified, is_default, value)
VALUES
('EUR', '2012-05-17 11:38:45', 't', 1.0),
('USD', '2012-05-17 11:38:45', 'f', '1.2724'),
('GBP', '2012-05-17 11:38:45', 'f', '0.8005');

INSERT INTO "products" (price, currency, calculated_price)
SELECT 200.0 AS price, 'USD' AS currency, (200.0 / value) AS calculated_price
FROM "currencies" WHERE id = 'USD';


If user is searching with other currency, let's say USD, we calculate the price in EUR and search the calculated_price column.

SELECT * FROM "products" WHERE calculated_price > 100.0 AND calculated_price < 200.0;


In this way we can compare prices very fast, because we don't need to calculate the actual price for every row, because it's calculated once.

Bad thing is that at least every day we have to re-calculate the default_price for all rows, because the currency rates has been changed.

Is there a better way to do deal with this?

Isn't there any other clever solution? Maybe some mathematical formula? I have an idea that the calculated_price is a ratio against some variable X and, when the currency changes, we update only that variable X, not the calculated_price, so we even don't need to update anything (rows)… Maybe some mathematician can solve it like this?

#### Best Answer

Here's a different approach for which recomputing the calculated_price is just an optimization, as opposed to being strictly necessary.

Suppose that in the currencies tables, you add another column, last_rate, which contains the exchange rate at the time the calculated_price was last updated, no matter when this happened.

To quickly retrieve a set of products with a price point between, say, 50 USD and 100 USD that include the desired results, you could do something like that:

  SELECT * FROM products
WHERE calculated_price > 50.0/(:last_rate*
(SELECT coalesce(max(value/last_rate),1) FROM currencies
WHERE value>last_rate))
AND calculated_price < 100.0/ (:last_rate*
(SELECT coalesce(min(value/last_rate),1) FROM currencies
WHERE value<last_rate))


where :last_rate contains the EUR/USD exchange rate at the time of the last update. The idea is to increase the interval to take into account the maximum variation of every currency. The increase factors for both ends of the interval are constant between rates updates, so they could be pre-computed.

Since the rates change only slightly over short periods of time, the above query is likely to give a close approximation of the final result. To get the final result, let's filter out the products for which the prices have slipped out of the bounds due to the changes in rates since the last update of calculated_price:

  WITH p AS (
SELECT * FROM products
WHERE calculated_price > 50.0/(:last_rate*
(SELECT coalesce(max(value/last_rate),1) FROM currencies
WHERE value>last_rate))
AND calculated_price < 100.0/ (:last_rate*
(SELECT coalesce(min(value/last_rate),1) FROM currencies
WHERE value<last_rate))
)
SELECT price,c.value FROM p join currencies c on (p.currency=c.id)
WHERE price/c.value>50/:current_rate
AND price/c.value<100/:current_rate;


where :current_rate is the more up-to-date rate with EUR for the money choosen by the user.

The efficiency comes from the fact that the range of rates is supposed to be small, the values being close together.