Datatype categories

Adaptive Server provides several system datatypes and the user-defined datatypes timestamp and sysname. Table 1-1 lists the categories of Adaptive Server datatypes. Each category is described in a section of this chapter.

**Table 1-1: Datatype categories**
Category	Used for
Exact numeric datatypes	Numeric values (both integers and numbers with a decimal portion) that must be represented exactly
Approximate numeric datatypes	Numeric data that can tolerate rounding during arithmetic operations
Money datatypes	Monetary data
Timestamp datatype	Tables that are browsed in Client-Library™ applications
Date and time datatypes	Date and time information
Character datatypes	Strings consisting of letters, numbers, and symbols
Binary datatypes	Raw binary data, such as pictures, in a hexadecimal-like notation
bit datatype	True/false and yes/no type data
sysname datatype	System tables
text and image datatypes	Printable characters or hexadecimal-like data that requires more than the maximum column size provided by you server’s logical page size.
User-defined datatypes	Defining objects that inherit the rules, default, null type, IDENTITY property, and base datatype