How to Handle Very Large Numbers?

[HumanJHawkins]

A student using MS Access 2016 made a table of celestial bodies that included their mass in Kg. The sun for example is 1.989E+30Kg (or 1989000000000000000000000000000Kg in standard notation). She used a datatype of Short Text.

I would like to help this student convert that to a number so she can (for example) select out the largest 10% of celestial bodies by mass. The new Large Number data type appears to hold only a max value of 2^63 (9.223372e+18 or 9223372000000000000 in standard notation)


.

Does Access have anything equivalent to the SQL

DECLARE @solarMass DECIMAL(35,0) = 1989000000000000000000000000000;

If not, what do you do when needing to handle large numbers in Access?

Thanks.

[CJ_London]

access has the decimal datatype, but to a precision of 28, not 35. There is also a reported issue with sorting -see this link https://www.fmsinc.com/microsoftacce...type/index.htm which may impact determining the top 10%

for myself, large numbers have not been a real issue. Where they have been, I've just stored them as text, taking care to ensure there were preceding zeros to maintain the order

1989000000000000000000000000000
0234500000000000000000000000000

the other option perhaps, if most of those zeros are not used is to cut the number down a bit