When working with monetary values in SQL, always prioritize precision – rounding errors are unacceptable when dealing with money. Here's what we should know:

The Right Choice: DECIMAL or NUMERIC

-- Good: Stores values exactly as entered
DECIMAL(15, 4)  -- Can hold up to 15 digits before and 4 after the decimal

The Wrong Choices

Avoid these for currency:

• FLOAT/REAL/DOUBLE – These use binary floating-point and will cause rounding errors

• Integer types – While you could store cents as integers (e.g., 1000 for $10.00), it makes queries harder to write and understand