Fixed point financial data versus floating point - Re: Spreadsheets (was Microsoft flamage)

On 2011-10-24 19:24, Chuck Guzis wrote: A long time ago, I was instructed that the "native" S/370 (integer) data format was S9(4) COMP and that it should be used whenever possible for fastest performance (counters, indices, etc.). I've now worked on non-IBM iron long enough that when I go back to the 360 family, I'll have to resort to the manuals to see if that still holds true and what formats are preferred these days on the fancy Z hardware. Mind you, these things are no longer considered important, nowadays; "we got plenty of storage and processing power to spare", so just use whatever comes to mind and let the conversions be done by the compiler. It's not until the weekend batches start overlapping the Monday morning online processing that people show up at my desk asking how to squeeze their jobs back into the batch window. Even then, a re-order of some WHERE clauses in SQL statements usually shaves about 50% off the processing time. Some of these guys seem genuinely surprised that the order in which statements are placed can actually have influence on performance. Imagine that! And it's not just the programmers; competent DBA's that know more than to up the storage quotum when a table runs out of space are few and far between, too. Programming with performance in mind is a vanishing art and an unpopular skill (in practice, that is; on paper, everybody pays lip service to it) these days. The solution is almost invariably to throw new hardware at the problem. Can't blame them, really. I mean, if I were in charge and a programmer told me, "give me three years and I'll have it running twice as fast on the current hardware," I'm pretty sure my reaction wouldn't be to give the go-ahead on that one. .tsooJ