activerecord sum returns a string?

Question

This seems very strange to me, an active record sum returns a string, not a number

basket_items.sum("price")

This seems to make it work, but i thought i may have missed something, as this seems like very strange behaviour.

basket_items.sum("price").to_i

Answer 1

According to the (rails 2.3.9) API:

The value is returned with the same data type of the column, 0 if there’s no row

Could your price column be a string or text?