Usage of FLOAT

The FLOAT example is valid for MySQL 5.1 and not for Oracle 10g as the latter is using decimal precision for FLOAT and binary precision for BINARY_FLOAT.

After reading the chapter about FLOAT’s and doing some test I submitted a bugreport to MySQL: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=57519

Thanks Daniël, those are good points. I did mention in my chapter on FLOAT that Oracle uses an exact numeric for FLOAT and IEEE inexact format for BINARY_FLOAT.

The ANSI/ISO SQL standard calls for IEEE format for FLOAT, and NUMERIC/DECIMAL are used for exact numerics. It’s surprising how many SQL implementations do not adhere to standard data types. Oracle in particular it seems, but that could be because that product predates the ANSI standard for SQL by a few years.