The Interbase documentation says that a float value should have a range from 1.175E-38 to 3.402E38. But, the largest value I can put in appears to be just under 3.4E38. 3.4E38 or higher results in overflow.

This came up when running the JDBC-CTS tests against Firebird embedded. Thanks go to my co-worker Dave M.

This was fixed in SAS Vulcan (S0275993). The code in jrd/cvt.cpp is using hard-coded 3.4E38 instead of the proper FLT_MAX symbol which is 3.402823466e+38F. Fix provided to Alex for review.

Here is bad test case:

create table float_test (i integer, f float);
insert into float_test values (1, 3.0);
insert into float_test values (1, 3.402823466e+38);

produces this output:
insert into float_test values (1, 3.402823466e+38);
Statement failed, SQLSTATE = 22003
arithmetic exception, numeric overflow, or string truncation
-numeric value is out of range

Here is correct results with my patch:

SQL> create table float_test (i integer, f float);
SQL> insert into float_test values (1, 3.0);
SQL> insert into float_test values (1, 3.402823466e+38);
SQL> select * from float_test;

           I F
============ ==============
           1 3.0000000
           1 3.4028235e+38