Vlad Drumea has a public service announcement:
In this post I provide some examples as to why FLOAT isn’t the best option for storing exact financial data in SQL Server.
During the last couple of years I’ve seen quite a few cases of FLOAT being used to store financial data in SQL Server.
This isn’t ideal due to how the FLOAT data type behaves in SQL Server, and the official documentation makes a clear note of that.
I’m crotchety enough about this to say that you shouldn’t use any sort of decimal data type (DECIMAL, MONEY, etc.) when dealing with currency data in important financial contexts, either. I reach for BIGINT and divide by 100 (or 10,000 if you keep to four spots after the decimal) for the presentation layer.
For cases in which my data isn’t the source system of record for financial transactions, DECIMAL is fine. I don’t generally like MONEY as a data type in any circumstance, to be honest.