This is a great tip, and I wish I had know about this back when I worked at the bank :-)

Another option, available to SAS 9.4 users, is to process the data using a DS2 DATA program and/or a FedSQL query. If you read from database tables and write the result back to the database, you don't need to worry about those pesky data type conversions, because both DS2 and FedSQL can handle those big numbers at native precision.