explore alternatives to strings or Decimal for the the postgres fixed point representation

[dpaiton]

strings suck bc they stay strings in the DB and decimal sucks because it is slow

[dpaiton]

We motivate this by ease of use (code under the hood would be much cleaner) and performance. To assess performance, we would really want to dig deeper into profiling to make sure this is a significantly big bottleneck.

I'm going to reduce priority on this; we should pick it back up once we decide to profile the database pipeline.