Storage space for numbers ??? Please help !

Hi,

        I would like to know it exactly how much phisical storage space is used by Oracle to store a NUMBER, a NUMBER (p,s), INTEGER, FLOAT, etc, and what are the exact values of 'p' and 's' if I say INTEGER or FLOAT.

I found a page (http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/faq/num_size.html) that says: Orcale uses a Base100 encoding, and that the actual space used depends on the actual number stored. (It is about 1+ceil (x/2) where x is the number of non-zero digits.)

But on the other hand, on a different page, I found the following:

Type                Storage     Range/Length               Comments
-----------------   ----------  --------------            
-------------------
NUMBER              16          40 digit floating point
FLOAT               16          40 digit floating point
SMALLINT            16          40 digit floating point

NUMBER(a,b)         varies      a digits, b precision
FLOAT(a,b)          varies      a digits, b precision

DECIMAL             16          40 digit

INTEGER             16          40 digits
INTEGER(a)          varies      a digits

Well. It is not an official Oracle page (nor the first one)... So it seems that if I say NUMBER or FLOAT then the used space is NOT dinamic but always 16 bytes, which is too much !

Does anybody have some treatable information on this question ? (The first page doesn't say that nothing about that it is not always dinamic, only if I explicitly define the precision and scale values...)

Thank you for your help.

Bye:

        Papp Laszlo

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Laszlo Papp
 
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