DECIMAL(p) Floating Point
The DECIMAL data type stores decimal floating-point numbers up to a maximum of 32 significant digits, where p is the total number of significant digits (the precision).
Specifying precision is optional. If you specify no precision (p), DECIMAL is treated as DECIMAL(16), a floating-point decimal with a precision of 16 places. DECIMAL(p) has an absolute exponent range between 10-130 and 10124.
If you declare a DECIMAL(p) column in an ANSI-compliant database, the scale defaults to DECIMAL(p, 0), meaning that only integer values can be stored in this data type.
In a database that is not ANSI-compliant, a DECIMAL(p) is a floating-point data type of a scale large enough to store the exponential notation for a value.
For example, the following calculation shows how many bytes of storage a DECIMAL(5) column requires in the default locale (where the decimal point occupies a single byte):
1 byte for the sign of the data value
1 byte for the 1st digit
1 byte for the decimal point
4 bytes for the rest of the digits (precision of 5 - 1)
1 byte for the e symbol
1 byte for the sign of the exponent
3 bytes for the exponent
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12 bytes total