We have had a long history of dealing with 'gotchas' when it comes to
numeric precision, particularly when dealing with currency amounts. The
biggest problem that we encounter is when a calculation has to be made on,
for example, an invoice line where there is a quantity, a unit price, and a
tax amount. The calculations of all of these things become a nightmare when
you are dealing with more than 2 decimal places, due to rounding and
precision issues.

When I saw that Firebird/Interbase had a specific DECIMAL type that allowed
you to precisely identify the number of decimal points of precision to work
with, I was overjoyed. No more rounding issues, truncation issues, etc. to
deal with.

So I think that if you are dealing with data and applications that have
currency involved, limiting the amount of decimal precision is a good thing
to have up your sleeve.

IMO... Of course.

Myles

===========================
Myles Wakeham
Director of Engineering
Tech Solutions Inc.
Scottsdale, Arizona USA
Phone (480) 451-7440
Web: www.techsol.org

> -----Original Message-----
> From: sdbeames [mailto:s.beames@...]
> Sent: Friday, October 22, 2004 12:58 PM
> To: firebird-support@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [firebird-support] NUMERIC or DECIMAL?
>
>
>
> (Dialect 3)
>
> I don't understand the idea of the NUMERIC type....DECIMAL
> seems more flexible. When would you use NUMERIC over DECIMAL?
>
> What is the point of having to specify a DECIMAL precision, if more
> is OK?
>
> Thanks,
> Steve
>
>
>
>
>
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