Real vs. Floating Point vs. Money

Question

Why when I save a value of say 40.54 in SQL Server to a column of type Real does it return to me a value that is more like 40.53999878999 instead of 40.54? I\'ve seen this

Answer 1

Floating point numbers use binary fractions, and they don't correspond exactly to decimal fractions.

For money, it's better to either store number of cents as integer, or use a decimal number type. For example, Decimal(8,2) stores 8 digits including 2 decimals (xxxxxx.xx), i.e. to cent precision.