What is the purpose of the decimal function in SQL?

In SQL, the DECIMAL function is used to truncate the decimal portion of a number to a specified number of digits, and returns a new value of DECIMAL type. The syntax is as follows:

Decimal(precision, scale)

In this case, p represents the number of digits after truncation, and s represents the total number of digits (including both integer and decimal places). The DECIMAL function is commonly used to limit the number of decimal places to ensure precision and accuracy.

For example, suppose there is a column named num of DECIMAL type storing some numbers, if we want to truncate its decimal part to two digits, we can use the DECIMAL(10, 2) function.

Choose the number ‘num’ from the table and round it to two decimal places, assigning it as ‘truncated_num’.

This way, we can create a new column called truncated_num, where the numbers are rounded to two decimal places.