Re: Connecting MS Access to Informix (how?? help, please !!)

"Reiner Kunz" <Reiner.Kunz@pr-kunz2.M.eunet.de> wrote: :Hi Nils, : :any ideas how to solve the problem that Access shows DECIMAL/MONEY = :informix data types only as simple textstrings in Access? Many thanks in = :advance! : :cu Reiner I don't know about MONEY. I never understood why anyone would want to use that datatype. As for DECIMAL they show up as floating point data in MS Access when I use the Openlink drivers. It's so long ago I used the Informix CLI drivers I don't remember for sure how that worked, nor do I know what the latest version does. Floating point is bad enough of course. That gives rounding errors. I would have wanted decimals to become currency datatype in MS Access if there where 4 or less digits after the decimal point. Not a good solution, but better than the current situation. I have talked to Openlink about this and they say it's some problem with MS Access that makes this impossible to implement. As this haven't been a significant problem for us yet, I haven't pursued the issue further. I would assume that these difficulties are why others have elected to return these datatypes as text. That at least removes the rounding error, and is fine for display and update although not for direct calculations. It also solves the problem with money type of displaying the currency symbol. It is however clear that the real culprit here is Microsoft. I don't quite grasp how it's possible to be so braindead as to not implement a true decimal type in every tool that may be used to handle money. It is however an all too common defect in many tools. The need for decimal datatypes was understood back in the 50's when Cobol was first created. It seems to have got lost with the C generation of programmers. Nils.Myklebust@idg.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company The Informix FAQ is at http://www.iiug.org