MySQL: preferred column type for (product) prices?

Question

In MySQL, what is the preferred column type for storing a product\'s price (or currencies in general)? Google learned me DECIMAL of FLOAT is often used, but I wonder which one i

Answer 1

Decimal is the one I would use

The basic difference between Decimal/Numeric and Float : Float is Approximate-number data type, which means that not all values in the data type range can be represented exactly. Decimal/Numeric is Fixed-Precision data type, which means that all the values in the data type reane can be represented exactly with precision and scale.

Converting from Decimal or Numeric to float can cause some loss of precision. For the Decimal or Numeric data types, SQL Server considers each specific combination of precision and scale as a different data type. DECIMAL(4,2) and DECIMAL(6,4) are different data types. This means that 11.22 and 11.2222 are different types though this is not the case for float. For FLOAT(6) 11.22 and 11.2222 are same data types.