One of my co-workers and I were discussing the difference between the data type MONEY and the data type DECIMAL(19,4). I was rather curious so I spent some time getting it all down on paper.

Details

First the obvious. MONEY takes up 8 bytes and stores the maximum possible values possible for the 8 bytes. 2^64 or -922,337,203,685,477.5808 to 922,337,203,685,477.5807. DECIMAL(19,4) will store any value that will fit into MONEY and then some, but it takes up 9 bytes. A DECIMAL(19,4) can hold a range of -999,999,999,999,999.9999 to 999,999,999,999,999.9999. This is actually considerably less than 2^72 (8bits * 9bytes) or -236,118,324,143,482,260.6848 to 236,118,324,143,482,260.6847 that actually could be stored in 9 bytes.

Next something interesting to try

CREATE TABLE MoneyTest (
Mon1 money, Mon2 AS Mon1*Mon1, Mon3 AS Mon1*Mon1*Mon1,
Dec1 decimal(19,4), Dec2 AS Dec1*Dec1, Dec3 AS Dec1*Dec1*Dec1,
MonDec AS Mon1*Dec1, DecMon AS Dec1*Mon1);
GO
EXEC sp_help MoneyTest;
GO

With an output of

If you look at the Length, Precision and Scale you will notice that they change for any of the computed columns that use the DECIMAL column. This is because if you (for example) multiply a DECIMAL(4,2) times another DECIMAL(4,2) you end up with a DECIMAL(8,4). It stops at Precision 38 because that is the maximum size of a DECIMAL data type. The MONEY data type however does not change when multiplied by itself.

Summary

So the major difference is that Money data types are smaller but have a fixed size. Decimal on the other hand takes up more space and when multiplying the size, precision, and scale are going to change. Personally that means that I’m going to story invoice amounts (for example) as Money (or even SmallMoney where I can) and tax rate as a Decimal.

Filed under: Microsoft SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication, T-SQL Tagged: code language, language sql, microsoft sql server, sql statements, T-SQL