Contents

• PostgreSQL Financial Extension
  • Installation
  • xirr aggregate function
  • Changelog
  • Copyright and License

PostgreSQL Financial Extension

This is a PostgreSQL extension for financial calculations.

Functions provided:

• xirr(amounts, dates [, guess]) - Irregular Internal Rate of Return. Aggregate function, much like XIRR in spreadsheet programs (Excel, LibreOffice, etc).

Installation

To build and install this extension, simply run:

% make
% sudo make install

Then, to activate this extension in your database, run the SQL:

CREATE EXTENSION financial;

If you run into problems with building, see PostgreSQL wiki for troubleshooting

xirr aggregate function

The basic form of the XIRR function is: xirr(amounts, dates [, guess])

Since XIRR is fundamentally an imprecise function, amounts is of type float8 (double precision). dates is timestamp with time zone.

For example, if table transaction has columns amount and time, do this:

db=# SELECT xirr(amount, time ORDER BY time) FROM transaction;
        xirr        
--------------------
 0.0176201237088334

The guess argument (also float8) is an optional initial guess. When omitted, the function will use annualized return as the guess, which is usually reliable. Excel and LibreOffice, however, use a guess of 0.1 by default:

SELECT xirr(amount, time, 0.1 ORDER BY time) FROM transaction;

Like any aggregate function, you can use xirr with GROUP BY or as a window function, e.g:

SELECT portfolio, xirr(amount, time ORDER BY time)
    FROM transaction GROUP BY portfolio;

SELECT xirr(amount, time) OVER (ORDER BY time)
    FROM transaction;

There are situations where XIRR (Newton's method) fails to arrive at a result. In these cases, the function returns NULL. Sometimes providing a better guess helps, but some inputs are simply indeterminate.

Because XIRR needs to do multiple passes over input data, all inputs to the aggregate function are held in memory (16 bytes per row). Beware that this can cause the server to run out of memory with extremely large data sets.

Changelog

1.0.1 (2015-06-18)

• Fix read of uninitialized data
• Implemented continuous integration via Travis-CI
• Minor tweaks to documentation and code

1.0.0 (2014-09-18)

• First stable release, fixes two Makefile issues

0.0.2 (2013-06-05)

• First release, contains xirr aggregate function

Copyright and License

Copyright (c) 2013-2015 Marti Raudsepp marti@juffo.org

pg_financial and all related files are available under The PostgreSQL License. See LICENSE file for details.