Roy,

>> Been there when we holidayed up here before moving - on the drive to
it there's a spring / fountain sort of thing - a lion's head on a rock
with water coming out of its mouth - I had a drink there while we
watched the buzzards doing courtship dances overhead.

You can't buy moments like that Roy!


>> My wife has a pen pal in Ulverstone - Penguin Road

Ah I nearly bought a house not far from there when I was first looking
to move to Tassie, but now live over on the North East coast in St Helens.

Cheers,

Phil.

Jan,

<< Actually, in DBISAM the currency type was BCD. >>

Delphi (Borland) did everyone a big disservice by calling the Currency data
type "Currency".

Here's the skinny:

1) The Currency data type *in Delphi* is like a BCD in DBISAM/EDB or a
DECIMAL/NUMERIC type in SQL.  It's a fixed-scale type that allows up to 4
decimal places and is actually stored as a 64-bit integer in memory.

2) The TCurrencyField (ftCurrency) field is stored as a floating-point type
(Double) that does *not* use a fixed-scale.  It simply displays the numbers
formatted/rounded to a fixed scale of 2.  Therefore, the actual data may
differ from what is displayed.  The results are usually more precise when
used in calculations, but you can run into issues like Phil has when moving
them to a fixed-scale type like the BCD/DECIMAL/NUMERIC types.

3) The TBCDField (ftBCD) field is stored as a TBCD structure in DBISAM, and
in EDB it's stored as a Currency type.  The TBCD structure is way too big,
and the Currency type works fine for most purposes (plus, is the only
compatible type in Delphi/BCB).

If you have any other questions, please let me know.

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Phil,

<< If a value is say: -10.655 then changing its type to DECIMAL(19,2) makes
it -10.65 >>

Are you sure that the value is actually -10.655, and not something with a
greater precision (like -10.6543222108) ?

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Phil,

<< I think Jan exaplains the problem I'm seeing, originally there was no
problem with the Currency (BCD) type in DBISAM, but using the Elevate
Migration it appears at least to cause a few problems when it converts the
Currency to floats. >>

Just to clarify - the migration isn't changing anything in the source data.
The Currency fields are already floating-point values.  The only thing the
migration does is change the sub-type of the field so that it's a plain
TFloatField in Delphi, and not a TCurrencyField.  This was done to be more
in-line with the SQL standard, which really doesn't have any concept of a
floating-point "currency" type, or at least doesn't make the distinction.

If you have any other questions, please let me know.

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com