Re: Adding IEEE 754:2008 decimal floating point and hardware support for it

On 12 June 2013 00:56, Craig Ringer <craig(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:

> The main thing I'm wondering is how/if to handle backward compatibility
> with the existing NUMERIC and its DECIMAL alias, or whether adding new
> DECIMAL32, DECIMAL64, and DECIMAL128 types would be more appropriate. I'd
> love to just use the SQL standard types name DECIMAL if possible, and the
> standard would allow for it (see below), but backward compat would be a
> challenge, as would coming up with a sensible transparent promotion scheme
> from 32->64->128->numeric and ways to stop undesired promotion.
>

For what it's worth, DB2 9.5 and later call these types DECFLOAT(16) and
DECFLOAT(34), and they are distinct from DECIMAL/NUMERIC.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/techarticle/dm-0801chainani/