[Discuss] Financial database / balance?

[jack at coats.org (Jack Coats)]

I have had issues with IBMs packed decimal being to short (8 bytes,
giving 15 decimal digits plus a sign) for keeping assets of large
companies. (yes, very large.  Normally we resorted to either writing
our own math package or using 'dollar only' accounting.  The IRS
normally is OK with that.  Just don't try it on payroll!)

The rounding errors with them only occurred during advanced operations
(not add and subtract).  Division mainly.  But you had to keep track
of your own decimal alignment.

If doing financial modeling, keeping numbers rounded to the nearest
thousand is often sufficient, depending on the data you are using.
But then you can turn to double precision float for pretty good
results.  If doing that, just realize a model is a 'guess' so the
rounding isn't normally much of an issue.

I am having to roll out my waybackmachine to remember some of those
days. ... Glad someone else is doing this for a living!