Dave <David.W.Spencer_at_elcaro.moc> wrote in message news:<3DC9045A.9070508_at_elcaro.moc>...
> For the book presumably you also considered problems outside the
> computer domain where number ranges fit conveniently into 8, 16 or 32
> binary digits (i.e. why you would want to store numbers in a database in
> the first place). Are there any?
"Outside the computer domain" is outside our scope of our book (SQL
Performance Tuning), but there's support for Oracle's design
decisions: () the inconsistency among non-Oracle DBMSs deciding the
lowest number (for example SQL Server has -32768 for SMALLINT but
Informix has -32767), () the Microsoft-ODBC requirement for metadata
"precision" information expressed as a number of decimal digits even
for SMALLINT, INTEGER, and BIGINT, () the fact that other DBMSs
generally use BCD to store DECIMAL/NUMERIC data, so they can have
problems too.
Peter Gulutzan
Author of "SQL Standards" (http://dbazine.com/gulutzan3.html)
Received on Wed Nov 06 2002 - 08:59:22 CST
