In the last episode (Oct 25), Sairam Krishnamurthy said:
> I have simple query like 'select * from table1 where
> column1=-107.6898780000'. This returns an empty set. But there is data
> corresponding to this value of column.
>
> When I looked more into it, it seems like a precision issue. The value
> for column1 is -107.689878.
>
> More interesting is that the following query fetches the row,
>
> 'select * from table1 where column1=-107.689878000'
>
> Note that there are only three trailing zeros in the second query while
> there were four in the first.
>
> Can somebody help me to find out the problem? I can very well truncate the
> trailing zeros when querying, but I am interested in finding why an
> additional trailing zero returns an empty set.
If column1 is a FLOAT field, try converting it to DECIMAL instead.
Floating-point fractions are stored in base-2 and there are inherent
rounding problems when converting to base-10 that make exact comparisons
difficult:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/numeric-types.html
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/problems-with-float.html
mysql> create table n ( c_float float(20,10), c_decimal decimal(20,10) );
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)
mysql> insert into n values ( -107.689878, -107.689878 );
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> select * from n;
+-----------------+-----------------+
| c_float | c_decimal |
+-----------------+-----------------+
| -107.6898803711 | -107.6898780000 |
+-----------------+-----------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
--
Dan Nelson
dnelson@stripped
