Re: Another JDBC (and by extension, JDBCR4) meta-data retrieval question

On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 11:50 AM, James H. H. Lampert
<jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On preferred display decimal places, there appears to be no such
animal among the columns of SYSCOLUMNS, and so the answer would seem to
be the same as the answer on relative record number: "That concept is
foreign to SQL." At any rate, it's not a big deal, by any means.

The concept is foreign to floats. I am trying to decipher what it
even means to have "preferred display" decimal places.

Let's see. After a little bit of experimentation, it looks like the
number of decimal places in the DDS is a hard specification. It's not
a *preferred* anything: you WILL get that many decimal places
DISPLAYED. Then you have to do the usual adjustment with the stuff
that comes after the 'E'.

You're right: This is not really something you should be worrying
about. If a scientist or engineer is storing floats, they sure as
hell are not going to be messing with formatting at the DDS level (and
may well even be confused by the DDS; why would anyone want to specify
anything less than the maximum precision; it's not even like you can
express the precision of a BINARY float in terms of an exact number of
DECIMAL digits anyway; etc., etc., etc.). And if a business logic
programmer is storing floats, they are probably not using the right
data type.

John