Numerical Precision

Hi. I need your assistance in this one:

I'm importing a big Text file with currency quantities in it to a FB table via EXTERNAL FILE. I do it in a two step process, because the original file I recieve is character sepparated with "|", so I have to transform it to a fixed lenght.

I do that with a little Delphi program I wrote. The problem arises in how it is tranformed, because I can't get the same result in FB when I do a SUM of all the records. I made the Delphi program to Sum every record it processed (5.4 million) and I get one number. If I do a SUM on the external table in FB I get another one (Sure, a difference of about half a million in a 86.7 billion total is less than 1%, but half a million can't do).

What should I check?

You should check the datatype used for storing the values !

I used Format( "%15.2f", [Var]) to write down the values in the text file, defined the field as CHAR of 15 in FB and without transferring nothing to an internal table I run a SELECT... SUM( CAST( Field AS DECIMAL(15,2)) and SUM( CAST( Field AS DOUBLE PRECISION) obtaining the same result between them, but different from what Delphi totals.