title: How can a mailing address in a database be encoded into a double
body: <p>I have an MDB database which holds information about patients (customers). I am trying to understand how the practice management system which controls the database works, however, when I look at the database schema, the 'Mailing Address' field is of type 'double' and the data shows a number such as "1.0814000000000000e+04" which represents the address "1 John Smith Road" with "SOMETOWN" as the suburb (a separate field in the application, but with no corresponding field in the database, which makes me assume that they are all bundled together), "QLD" as the region and "1111" as the postcode.</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone have a clue as to how this information becomes a double and if so, how might I go about reconstructing it as an address?</p>