Decimal problem

[Cheryl Gray]

I was taking an online class and I saw this,
CREATE TABLE STAFF(STAFFNUM DECIMAL(6,0));

Could we also put this as STAFFNUM INT ? Why are users allowed to specify 0 decimal places?

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Maybe the table creator was trying to specify that the id number cannot be more than six digits?

I suspect this could be a char(6) or varchar(6) column rather than numeric in the first place. Unless it makes sense to do arithmetic or numerical comparisons with ids, they aren't really numbers. They are identifiers that happen to consist of digits.

[Paul Campbell]

Originally posted by Jeanne Boyarsky:
Maybe the table creator was trying to specify that the id number cannot be more than six digits?

I suspect this could be a char(6) or varchar(6) column rather than numeric in the first place. Unless it makes sense to do arithmetic or numerical comparisons with ids, they aren't really numbers. They are identifiers that happen to consist of digits.

STAFFNUM is likely similar to my employee number... which happens to be 6 digits as well.

From a data modeling standpoint... it isn't really a number and should be stored as character data.
[ October 19, 2007: Message edited by: Paul Campbell ]