Thanks for all of your input. Since I haven't seen any replies about returning a decimal value that has not been modified by the leading or trailing zeros, I...

I forgot one small item. The main reason for putting the data in a database is for easy reporting. Using the SQL aggregate functions, AVG, STDEV, MIN, MAX,...

I am dealing with an application that stores data records in text files. When data records are written to the text files, decimal values are not written with a...