Engineering Tip

Controlling the Precision of a Floating Point Number Being Written to a Database

When creating a Schema for a database in FactoryLink, the key file offers five options for Column Type in the Schema Information table. They are smallint, integer, character, date and float. Using the float choice saves the data with a default precision of 11.5. (i.e. 123456.78901) This is often times more, or less, precision than required. The Column Type field will allow custom types as well as the key selections.   Below you will find explanations on how to control these values for the different databases.

dBase IV:

To specify the precision when writing to a dBase IV Database, enter the column type "NUMBER" and the desired precision. The decimal point is treated as a character in dBase IV, so the example below will result in a number with the format 1234.67.

SQL SERVER:

To specify the precision when writing to a SQL Server Database, enter the column type "NUMERIC" and the desired precision. The decimal point is not considered a character in SQL Server so the example below will result in a number with the format 1234.56.

ACCESS:

There is no known solution for ACCESS at this time.