Best Practices for Storing High Value Numeric Fields (Billions+) in Appian Records

RE: Best Practices for Storing High Value Numeric Fields (Billions+) in Appian Records

Shubham Aware — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 10:00:34 GMT

You can try storing values in cents as integers (multiply by 100).
Example: $1,234.56 -> store as 123456. Divide by 100 when displaying or calculating.
This approach eliminates all floating-point precision issues.
Use Number (Integer) instead of Number (Decimal) to achieve better precision.
Worth trying...

RE: Best Practices for Storing High Value Numeric Fields (Billions+) in Appian Records

Mathieu Drouin — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 03:22:11 GMT

Have you considered using this library for calculations: community.appian.com/.../big-numbers-functions

RE: Best Practices for Storing High Value Numeric Fields (Billions+) in Appian Records

strohl3352 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:44:02 GMT

Doing fixed point calculations in the database and returning as text to Appian in order to see the whole value if needed makes sense, although I imagine it would result in a lot of views/stored procedures and be fairly cumbersome to implement if it's a calculation intensive application on large numbers.

As far as scaled integers, is this not just what the IEEE 754 standard implementation of double does under the hood which would run into the same precision issues at large values or are you referring to some other concept?

RE: Best Practices for Storing High Value Numeric Fields (Billions+) in Appian Records

vinodn3917 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:08:01 GMT

Because Appian uses floating-point numbers, we avoid using decimals for large financial values. Instead, we either delegate calculations to the database or store scaled integers to preserve precision and future calculation capability