SQL Server floating point representation

Hi Everyone,

I've been using Java and JDBC code from Scott Klement and Jon Juracich
to retrieve data from an SQL Server table and it's been working fine
(thanks Scott & Jon!).

However, today it choked on a character representation of a numeric
value. Normal values coming from the SQL Server table look like this:

QUANTITY
4.0
0.0
0.39946459905712706
45.0
150.0

But today, one of the values was

1.1102230246251565E-16

I'm using the %dec() bif to convert these values to packed decimal, but
it doesn't handle character representations of floating point values.
I'm not even sure whether that's IEEE floating point or some other type.

The SQL statement I'm using is pretty simple:

SELECT Sku, Country, Period, Final_Fcst
FROM FCST_EXPORT
ORDER BY Country, Sku, Period

I tried changing it to

SELECT Sku, Country, Period, cast(Final_Fcst as dec(9,0))
FROM FCST_EXPORT
ORDER BY Country, Sku, Period

but that converted 6.211988930813584 to 3 and 1.1102230246251565E-16 to
0 (the latter might be right, but the former should be 6).

What am I doing wrong? A link to a good .pdf manual for SQL Server
would be welcome.

*Peter Dow* /
Dow Software Services, Inc.
909 793-9050
pdow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:pdow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> /