Oracle Floats vs Number

Question

I\'m seeing conflicting references in Oracles documentation. Is there any difference between how decimals are stored in a FLOAT and a NUMBER types in the database?

A

Answer 1

Oracle's Number is in fact a Decimal (base-10) floating point representation... Float is just an alias for Number and does the exact same thing.

if you want Binary (base-2) floats, you need to use Oracle's BINARY_FLOAT or BINARY_DOUBLE datatypes.

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