[TriLUG] Money in mysql

[Matt Frye]

> http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Numeric_type_overview.html...
> indicates that it's stored as a CHAR value...

> However, the comment on the range leads me to think that if you do
> arithmetic in the database, it's going to convert the values...

My early morning reading of this doc and its relative ambiguity is
what lead to the original question.  It seems strange that one would
represent numbers as characters, like faces without value.  As Rick
pointed out, however, the sad and interesting truth is that eventually
the computer doesn't know what the number is.  It just knows that we
told it to remember the thing.

These questions must have occurred to someone at MySQL at some point,
hence the white paper.  It appears as though they felt they didn't
need to implement some new CURRENCY data type because what was already
available in MS Access was simply a more restrictive implementation of
what MySQL already had.  I can't entirely blame them.


MPF