Do applications actually use decimal data?
Yes. Data collected for a survey of commercial databases (the survey reported in IBM Technical Report TR 03.413 by A. Tsang & M. Olschanowsky) analyzed the column datatypes of databases owned by 51 major organizations. These databases covered a wide range of applications, including Airline systems, Banking, Financial Analysis, Insurance, Inventory control, Management reporting, Marketing services, Order entry, Order processing, Pharmaceutical applications, and Retail sales. In all, 1,091,916 columns were analysed. Of these columns, 41.8% contained identifiably numeric data (53.7% contained ‘char’ data, with an average length of 8.58 characters, some of which will have contained numeric data in character form).
