Hello,

what is the size of the Oracle datatype NUMBER in bytes?

Thank you,
Norbert

"Norbert Pürringer" <thalion77 (AT) graffiti (DOT) net> wrote

are stores in base 100 so a good approximation is logbase10(the number)/2 +1
.. Numbers are internally expressed in scientific notation so 1,000,000,000
isn't much larger than 10 in terms of storage. You can be empirical about
it using vsize eg select vsize(mynumbercolumn) from mytable;

On Feb 25, 8:25*am, Norbert Pürringer <thalio... (AT) graffiti (DOT) net> wrote:

At
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B...1.htm#sthref81
the manual states:
<q>
NUMBER Datatype

The NUMBER datatype stores zero as well as positive and negative fixed
numbers with absolute values from 1.0 x 10^-130 to (but not including)
1.0 x 10^126. If you specify an arithmetic expression whose value has
an absolute value greater than or equal to 1.0 x 10^126, then Oracle
returns an error. Each NUMBER value requires from 1 to 22 bytes.
</q>

If you don't specify the precision when declaring the column, then the
default is the max, 22bytes.

Reading the manual is a great way to answer these questions for
yourself.
Ed

On Feb 25, 9:56*am, "gym dot scuba dot kennedy at gmail"
<kenned... (AT) verizon (DOT) net> wrote:
I have always just used the formula published by Oracle to approximate
the internal storage needed for a numeric value: round((( length((p)
+ s) / 2)) + 1 where s = 0 for a positive number and 1 for a negative
number

Note that powers of 10, that is, 100, 1000, 10000, 1000000 etc just
need to increase the exponent.

HTH -- Mark D Powell --