Datatype Categories

SAP ASE provides several system datatypes and the user-defined datatypes timestamp, sysname, and longsysname.

• Exact Numeric Datatypes
  Use the exact numeric datatypes to represent a value exactly. SAP ASE provides exact numeric types for both integers (whole numbers) and numbers with a decimal portion.
• Approximate Numeric Datatypes
  Use the approximate numeric types, float, double precision, and real, for numeric data that can tolerate rounding. The approximate numeric types are especially suited to data that covers a wide range of values. They support all aggregate functions and all arithmetic operations.
• Money Datatypes
  Use the money and smallmoney datatypes to store monetary data.
• timestamp Datatype
  Use the user-defined timestamp datatype in tables that are to be browsed in Client-Library™ applications. SAP ASE updates the timestamp column each time its row is modified. A table can have only one column of timestamp datatype.
• Date and Time Datatypes
  Use datetime, smalldatetime, bigdatetime, bigtime, date, and time to store absolute date and time information. Use timestamp to store binary-type information.
• Character Datatypes
  Which datatype you use for a situation depends on the type of data you are storing.
• Binary Datatypes
  Use the binary datatypes, binary(n) and varbinary(n), to store raw binary data, such as pictures, in a raw binary notation, up to the maximum column size for your server’s logical page size.
• bit Datatype
  Use the bit datatype for columns that contain true/false and yes/no types of data. The status column in the syscolumns system table indicates the unique offset position for bit datatype columns.
• sysname and longsysname Datatypes
  sysname and longsysname are user-defined datatypes that are distributed on the SAP ASE installation media and used in the system tables.
• text, image, and unitext Datatypes
  text columns are variable-length columns that can hold up to 2,147,483,647 (231 - 1) bytes of printable characters.