I agree on all counts. The only way that I would extend the description of "the number of decimal digits" is that I think it's fairly clear that for floating point numbers it should be "the number of significant digits" since the fractional part is often only an approximation of any decimal representation, and its representation could go on forever.
java.util.Date and its java.sql subclasses have well defined formats. No elaboration with the precision is required, and I've never seen any hint that it is intended to apply. As someone tasked with keeping a software framework functional and efficient with multiple database products through standard JDBC, I often find myself dealing with different vendor interpretations of the softer parts of the JDBC spec. Each vendor is understandably reluctant to switch from a plausible interpretation they've already implemented to someone else's interpretation. -Kevin >>> Oliver Jowett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 06/13/05 4:57 PM >>> Actually, I just dug through the JDBC javadoc, and noticed that ResultSetMetaData.getPrecision() does talk about the number of decimal digits; but in all the other places it's used (such as DatabaseMetaData) it's not described. For numeric types using number of decimal digits seems reasonable since it's consistent with the NUMERIC type's precision/scale information. Previous reports of this also wanted to provide precision for dates and times according to the number of digits in them, which seems much more dubious. I guess it's another case of the JDBC specification being woefully underspecified :( ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: subscribe and unsubscribe commands go to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
