Most database servers support a rich set of data types, including a number of floating-point types of varying scale and precision. The set of data types supported by Microsoft Jet may not exactly match many of the data types on a specific database server. To allow transparent data access, however, Microsoft Jet must select an equivalent data type for each field in a remote table. This section discusses the rules that Microsoft Jet uses to select local data types to represent standard ODBC data types and vice versa.