Avoid the problem with BigDecimal when migrating to Java 1.4 to Java 1.5+
- by romaintaz
Hello,
I've recently migrated a Java 1.4 application to a Java 6 environment. Unfortunately, I encountered a problem with the BigDecimal storage in a Oracle database. To summarize, when I try to store a "7.65E+7" BigDecimal value (76,500,000.00) in the database, Oracle stores in reality the value of 7,650,000.00. This defect is due to the rewritting of the BigDecimal class in Java 1.5 (see here).
In my code, the BigDecimal was created from a double using this kind of code:
BigDecimal myBD = new BigDecimal("" + someDoubleValue);
someObject.setAmount(myBD);
// Now let Hibernate persists my object in DB...
In more than 99% of the cases, everything works fine. Except that in really few case, the bug mentioned above occurs. And that's quite annoying.
If I change the previous code to avoid the use of the String constructor of BigDecimal, then I do not encounter the bug in my uses cases:
BigDecimal myBD = new BigDecimal(someDoubleValue);
someObject.setAmount(myBD);
// Now let Hibernate persists my object in DB...
However, how can I be sure that this solution is the correct way to handle the use of BigDecimal?
So my question is to know how I have to manage my BigDecimal values to avoid this issue:
Do not use the new BigDecimal(String) constructor and use directly the new BigDecimal(double)?
Force Oracle to use toPlainString() instead of toString() method when dealing with BigDecimal (and in this case how to do that)?
Any other solution?
Environment information:
Java 1.6.0_14
Hibernate 2.1.8 (yes, it is a quite old version)
Oracle JDBC 9.0.2.0 and also tested with 10.2.0.3.0
Oracle database 10.2.0.3.0
