Best HP Financial Calculator

[Dave Britten]

(05-06-2015 12:53 AM)TASP Wrote:  Thanks for that. I can imagine 'bean counters' stroking out over even trifling sums if the cause of the discrepancy is unknown.

And in iterative calculations, I'm thinking even 'non-obscene' amounts of money might start building up round off errors, and if 2 differing machines yielded differing errors, I can imagine some of the accounting staff running into the night, screaming and pulling their hair out.

Definitely. Fortunately, SQL Server supports up to 38 digits for the fixed-point decimal data type, with a selectable decimal point position. Using 38 digits costs 17 bytes per value, though. Most of our databases use 19 digits with 5 after the decimal point, 19 being the most you can get for 9 bytes.