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Subject: Re: [PORTS] which type matches Oracle's NUMBER type best? From: doctor@fruitbat.org Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2000 12:55:48 -0700 (PDT) The Hermit Hacker said ... > talked this one over with one of our Oracle guys here at work a month or > so back ... seems that *everything* for Oracle is a NUMBER ... whether its > an INT or a DECIMAL or what ... > > Its there 'jack of all trades' sort of type that everything equates to > ... it. int == number with a precision of 0 ... or somethign like that ... Oracle's NUMBER type is a superset of other numeric datatypes. It can contain integers, floats, decimals, all of quite a large percision and scale. You can use the other types (INTEGER, DECIMAL, FLOAT, etc), and PL/SQL will honor their structure, but NUMBER gives you the best-of-breed solution for storing numeric data. There isn't really a good equivalent in Postgres. Really, it depends on your application data. You should spend some time modeling your data to see what you really need. ===