The MONETARY category

The MONETARY category defines the currency notation for display formats of monetary values.

The currency notion for display formats of monetary values are:
  • The currency symbol, and whether it appears before or after a monetary value
  • The monetary decimal separator
  • The monetary thousands separator
  • The number of digits to group between each appearance of a monetary thousands separator
  • The characters that indicate positive and negative monetary values and the position of these characters (before or after)
  • The scale (the number of fractional digits to the right of the decimal point) to display
This currency notation applies to the display formats of data from MONEY columns within a client application.
Important: Information in the MONETARY category does not affect the internal format of the MONEY data type in the database.

The MONETARY category also defines the default scale for a MONEY column. For the default locale (U.S. English), the database server stores values of the data type MONEY(precision) in the same internal format as the data type DECIMAL(precision,2). A nondefault locale can define a different default scale. For more information about default scales, see Specify values for the scale parameter.