To resume, when instantiating a BigDecimal using its non String constructor, sometimes the driver makes a bad interpretation and insert a bad value in the database. Imagine my surprise, since I'm working on a trading application, when I ran across it. A client bought 2250 shares of a certain company and got only 22 shares. We only saw this the day after when our client complains. Oups...
The solution I found was quite simple. We just have to use the String constructor of the BigDecimal. OK.
The thing I didn't understand was that I always created my BigDecimal objects using the String constructor. So I should not have run into that bug.
My mistake was to use the stripTrailingZeros method right after I created my BigDecimal objects. This method returns a new Bigdecimal using the BigInteger/scale constructor stripped from its trailing zeros.
If you really want to use this method and you cannot upgrade your driver (10.2.0.4 has some issues too), a simple solution is to re-create a new BigDecimal object after calling stripTrailingZeros like this :
BigDecimal myNumber = new BigDecimal("2250.0");
myNumber = myNumber.stripTrailingZeros();
myNumber = new BigDecimal(myNumber.toPlainString());
If you're using iBatis, you can use the solution described here.
