float shuold work.. have you tried DOUBLE?

Neither double nor float worked and both reset the number to -12.

- John

obviously you tried setting it as DOUBLE(4,2)

which is what i use to store small currency amounts with 2 decimal places, works for me although i don't have negatives

hmm... If you specify that it is UNSIGNED that it will disallow negatives according to MySQL's docs. I wonder if that is your issue.

You can also try DECIMAL.

Make sure when you define the data type you passing 2 values.

DOUBLE(M,D)

If M and D are omitted, values are stored to the limits allowed by the hardware, M is the total number of digits and D is the number of digits following the decimal point. It could be your hardware limit is low if you didn't specify these values.

@topr8 Not obvious if it's my first time working with non-whole numbers.

Apparently floats are intended for smaller numbers and doubles for larger numbers according to a site that comes up for the search, 'MySQL data types'.

Turns out after testing the length of a value that what I wanted was float(4,2) which I'm using to store time zone unless any one has a better suggestion for that?

Thanks for your replies! :)

- John

That is what I would use... glad you got it working, just make sure the values won't go higher than 9999.99 as anything higher or lower won't fit.

Well unless the world's rotation drastically slows in our lifetime I think this will work just fine. :)

- John