I'm not sure I ever advised casting to decimal, I did say casting to REAL is one possible workaround, which I'm sure would work fine in Postgres but might not in MySQL. That said, I agree you do not want to have unneeded code like that ending up in your production environment. May I ask why you are not using the intended production DB while developing? It's very trivial to install MySQL or Postgres on a local machine, or some networked PC standing around the office - even on Windows machines. I mean I'm obviously a fan of SQLite myself, but I use it in production environments mostly. I can't imagine using it as a stand-in for PG or MySQL when the eventual intent is to use one of those. What would be the rationale for that, other than having an extremely crappy dev machine?