Re: RDBMS comparison tool

On 05/01/2013 20:49, Darren Duncan wrote:
> On 2013.01.05 5:39 AM, Lyle wrote:
>> I'm not overly familiar with Perl's internal handling of number. I 
>> guess if you
>> have DECIMAL from a character string Perl will switch it out to an 
>> approximate
>> the moment you do a calculation on it. Furthermore if the DBI (or the 
>> DBDs, I'm
>> not sure where the distinction lies) is already putting it into a 
>> Perl decimal
>> which is floating point, then the battle has already been lost before 
>> it gets to
>> me.
>
> ...
>
> As for what DBDs actually do, well that's a different matter; but I'm 
> talking about what *could* be done in the Perl somewhere, and 
> typically I'd expect the DBD to make that decision on the Perl's behalf.

The DBI docs have:
"Most data is returned to the Perl script as strings. (Null values are 
returned as |undef|.) This allows arbitrary precision numeric data to be 
handled without loss of accuracy. Beware that Perl may not preserve the 
same accuracy when the string is used as a number."

So as long as the DBD isn't breaking this, I should be getting decimal 
numbers back as strings.


Lyle