Does anyone know how to handle packed decimal characters or values in DB2? Is it best just to have it converted to ASCII before loading it into a table?
I only ask this question because the customer is concerned with performance and data volume. Currently by using packed decimal they say 2x in space.

Mike

A decimal column is stored as packed decimal ((n+1)/2). Numeric is the equivilent to decimal data type.

Date (4 bytes), time (4 bytes), and timestamp (10 bytes) columns are stored similar to packed decimal, but without the sign in last half byte (n/2). This is true even though they are returned to programs as char data types and must be input as char data types.

An integer is stored as a full word binary (4 bytes), and smallint is stored as half-word binary (2 bytes).

Marcus_A,

From your explaination it sounds like the saved data will not eat up extra space. But, what if I want to send the data to another system in the same format
it came in? I.e. the packed decimal without having to do a conversion?

Is this possible?

Mike

I am not sure I know what you mean by "other system". Db2 stores the data in "packed' format. In some cases like date, time, and timestamp, the data is returned to the applicaiton program in character format with the extra dashes, slashes, colons, etc. When a program puts that data into another database (DB2 or otherwise) it will store it as packed.