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  3. February 2008

Re: SQL RAND function question

Luis Colorado wrote:
I think you have found a very interesting bug in the rand() function! I guess you should have the honor to report it to IBM.

Very interesting finding. Although I agree that it is rather uncommon, given a large enough sample, this could break your programs.
Even more fun... I created a field 31 digits long with 30 decimals.

I simply inserted rand() into that field and in 100,000 iterations I got five instances of 1.000000000(...).

So, whatever the precision used for rand(), it's evidently more than 31 decimals, and that's a little scary.

I then upped the field size to 63 digits with 62 decimals. SQL can't even display that; you get an overflow error. But by using DIGITS I was able to check and see if the first digit was a one, and again I got five instances of 1. Which means the precision is even greater than 62 digits, which means you will get false endpoints.

Joe



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