NUMBER
You use the NUMBER datatype to store fixed or floating-point Oracle numbers. You can specify precision and scale. The maximum precision of a NUMBER value is 38; the magnitude range is 1.0E-129 to 9.99E125. Scale can range from -84 to 127.
NUMBER values are stored in a variable-length format, starting with an exponent byte and followed by 19 mantissa bytes. The high-order bit of the exponent byte is a sign bit, which is set for positive numbers. The low-order 7 bits represent the magnitude.
The mantissa forms a 38-digit number with each byte representing 2 of the digits in a base-100 format. The sign of the mantissa is specified by the value of the first (left-most) byte. If greater than 101 then the mantissa is negative and the first digit of the mantissa is equal to the left-most byte minus 101.
On output, the host variable contains the number as represented internally by Oracle. To accommodate the largest possible number, the output host variable must be 21 bytes long. Only the bytes used to represent the number are returned. Oracle does not blank-pad or null-terminate the output value. If you need to know the length of the returned value, use the VARNUM datatype instead.
There is seldom a need to use this external datatype.