Re: which type matches Oracle's NUMBER type best?

The Hermit Hacker said ...
> talked this one over with one of our Oracle guys here at work a month or
> so back ... seems that *everything* for Oracle is a NUMBER ... whether its
> an INT or a DECIMAL or what ...
>
> Its there 'jack of all trades' sort of type that everything equates to
> ... it. int == number with a precision of 0 ... or somethign like that ...

Oracle's NUMBER type is a superset of other numeric datatypes.  It can
contain integers, floats, decimals, all of quite a large percision and
scale.  You can use the other types (INTEGER, DECIMAL, FLOAT, etc), and
PL/SQL will honor their structure, but NUMBER gives you the best-of-breed
solution for storing numeric data.

There isn't really a good equivalent in Postgres.  Really, it depends on
your application data.  You should spend some time modeling your data to
see what you really need.

> On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, David Wetzel wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > which type matches Oracle's NUMBER type best?
> > What ca I store in Oracle's NUMBER types?
> >
> > TIA


--
Peter A. Castro (doctor@fruitbat.org) or (pcastro@us.oracle.com)