I wonder if they use Informatica?

Saw this article on CNN today:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/15/quadrillion.dollar.glitch/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

Haha! It seems likely to me that someone probably had the wrong arrow pointed to a float field. Was probably some sort of insanely large transaction key field - just a huge integer. Notice there was no decimal value. So, they probably ended up sticking some gigantic numeric field into a credit float field.

Not that first time I've seen this kind of thing. Seems like it happens every couple of months, actually.

Edit checks are a good thing. I'm thinking if you code a system that handles credit card data, and a single credit comes across that's larger than the national debt, you might want to throw an error and abend.

You know - just a suggestion.