SQL Kiwi (1/3/2012)
No worries Hugo, though I am a little depressed that the values I chose don't make the difference easier to spot - it really wasn't my intention for this question to be a test of reading skills 🙁
It is a good question. Nicely shoots down the myth that these fixed point "exact" numerics have fewer (or less serious) rounding issues than floating point approximate numerics.
I would have thought that if anyone ran it they would notice the difference between 570 and 567 as the last three digits of the result, so it hardly seems a test of reading skills.
But why run it, when it's clear that using decimal(38,20) to multiply these two numbers will run you head on into the draconian rounding used for "exact" numerics?
Tom