Re: Oracle and Floating Point Processors

Article <bartho.42.728231873_at_cc.und.ac.za> by bartho_at_cc.und.ac.za (Ray Bartho) says:
|1. Does Oracle perform floating point calculations internally ?
No. All internal number calculations are done with the Oracle number format (described in your DBA guide), which has the extremely pleasent effect that calculations done on ANY system running Oracle will be exactly the same.
|
|2. Is Oracle designed to make use of floating point processors if they exist
|on the system ?

As a consequence of the above, no. A floating point processor may be used when precompiler programs (or OCI programs) have variables of type float or double, when doing the conversions between oracle internal number format and the float or double.
|
|3. To what extent will this increase the performance of Oracle ?
Performance may be boosted if you have a lot of the above conversions.

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