Re: [SPAM-bayes] Re: [cx-oracle-users] float vs. int

[Anthony T. <an...@co...>]

The only possibility that I can think of right now is that they incur
the overhead of checking if trunc(result) == result and returning an
integer as a result. That has two problems with it, though. (1) the
performance penalty and (2) the possibility of getting back an integer
when you wanted a float

On Mon, 2003-10-06 at 12:25, Marcos Sánchez Provencio wrote:
> But other interfaces do return the right thing, ¿don't they? I mean,
> odbc and SQL*Plus. (Can't check right now though)
> 
> El lun, 06-10-2003 a las 19:17, Anthony Tuininga escribió:
> > On Sat, 2003-09-27 at 21:27, Geoff Gerrietts wrote:
> > > Quoting Geoff Gerrietts (ge...@ge...):
> > > > What are the criteria for deciding when a NUMBER will be returned as
> > > > a float, or when it will be returned as an int or long?
> > > 
> > > Terribly sorry; found the answer in the mailing list archives.
> > 
> > No problem. This isn't the first time the problem has appeared. It is
> > one of those things that annoys me every time I think about it. But I
> > haven't found a really useful solution so far.
> > 
> > > I think for my uses, anything with a scale 0 < sys.maxint should be an
> > > integer, and anything with a scale 0 > sys.maxint should be a long.
> > > This does not violate the principle of least surprise, and it also
> > > relieves me of the burden of post-processing every query result so
> > > CORBA doesn't barf.
> > 
> > That should be quite reasonable and simple to implement. I am assuming
> > that you mean "value" when you state "scale" above, right? Does anyone
> > have any objections to that implementation? Of course, it doesn't solve
> > the problem that most people immediately complain about, which is "Why
> > do I get a float back when I issue the query 'select count(*) from
> > table'"? Unfortunately, Oracle returns a scale of "0" and a precision of
> > "0" meaning no information is available as to whether an integer or a
> > floating point number is being returned.
> > 
> > > With decimals, it would be nice to work with fixed point rather than
> > > floats, but that would likely be a substantial change in my
> > > application: floats are everywhere, and in several places, I expect
> > > them to be floats.
> > 
> > True. I've considered adding an extension which would allow
> > specification of what is to be returned. I still haven't come up with a
> > reasonable name for it or whether I should overload setoutputsize() in
> > some way. Essentially, it would mean the following:
> > 
> > cursor.somefunc(1, cx_Oracle.INTEGER)
> > cursor.somefunc(2, cx_Oracle.FLOAT)
> > cursor.somefunc(3, cx_Oracle.FIXED_POINT)
> > 
> > where of course, the constants defined above don't exist yet and
> > "somefunc" needs to be named properly so that it makes sense. Any
> > suggestions?
> > 
> > > Thanks,
> > > --G.
-- 
Anthony Tuininga
an...@co...
 
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