Should you choose the MONEY or DECIMAL(x,y) datatypes in SQL Server?

Question

I\'m curious as to whether or not there is a real difference between the money datatype and something like decimal(19,4) (which is what money uses

Answer 1

I want to give a different view of MONEY vs. NUMERICAL, largely based my own expertise and experience... My point of view here is MONEY, because I have worked with it for a considerable long time and never really used NUMERICAL much...

MONEY Pro:

• Native Data Type. It uses a native data type (integer) as the same as a CPU register (32 or 64 bit), so the calculation doesn't need unnecessary overhead so it's smaller and faster... MONEY needs 8 bytes and NUMERICAL(19, 4) needs 9 bytes (12.5% bigger)...

  MONEY is faster as long as it is used for it was meant to be (as money). How fast? My simple SUM test on 1 million data shows that MONEY is 275 ms and NUMERIC 517 ms... That is almost twice as fast... Why SUM test? See next Pro point

• Best for Money. MONEY is best for storing money and do operations, for example, in accounting. A single report can run millions of additions (SUM) and a few multiplications after the SUM operation is done. For very big accounting applications it is almost twice as fast, and it is extremely significant...
• Low Precision of Money. Money in real life doesn't need to be very precise. I mean, many people may care about 1 cent USD, but how about 0.01 cent USD? In fact, in my country, banks no longer care about cents (digit after decimal comma); I don't know about US bank or other country...

MONEY Con:

• Limited Precision. MONEY only has four digits (after the comma) precision, so it has to be converted before doing operations such as division... But then again money doesn't need to be so precise and is meant to be used as money, not just a number...

But... Big, but here is even your application involved real-money, but do not use it in lots of SUM operations, like in accounting. If you use lots of divisions and multiplications instead then you should not use MONEY...