I had to make a CHAR(1 CHAR) column wider and I forgot to change the column type to VARCHAR2:
DUPLICADO CHAR(3 CHAR)
I noticed the error when my PHP app would no longer find exact matches, e.g.:
SELECT *
FROM NUMEROS
WHERE DUPLICADO = :foo
... with :foo being #4 didn't find the 3-char padded #4 value. However, I initially hit a red herring while debugging the query in SQL Developer because injecting raw values into the query would find matches!
SELECT *
FROM NUMEROS
WHERE DUPLICADO = '#4'
Why do I get matches with the second query? Why do prepared statements make a difference?
To expand a little on my comments, I found a bit in the documentation that explains difference between blankpadded and nonpadded comparison:
http://docs.oracle.com/database/121/SQLRF/sql_elements002.htm#BABJBDGB
If both values in your comparison (the two sides of the equal sign) have datatype CHAR or NCHAR or are literal strings, then Oracle chooses blankpadded comparison. That means that if the lengths are different, then it pads the short one with blanks until they are the same length.
With the column DUPLICADO being a CHAR(3), the value '#4' is stored in the column as three characters '#4 ' (note the blank as third character.) When you do DUPLICADO = '#4' the rule states Oracle will use blankpadded comparison and therefore blankpad the literal '#4' until it has the same length as the column. So it actually becomes DUPLICADO = '#4 '.
But when you do DUPLICADO = :foo, it will depend on the datatype of the bind variable. If the datatype is CHAR, it will also perform blankpadded comparison. But if the datatype is VARCHAR2, then Oracle will use non-padded comparison and then it will be up to you to ensure to do blankpadding where necessary.
Depending on client or client language you may be able to specify the datatype of the bind variable and thereby get blankpadded or nonpadded comparison as needed.
SQL Developer may be a special case that might not allow you to specify datatype - it just possibly might default to bind variables always being datatype VARCHAR2. I don't know sufficient about SQL Developer to be certain about that ;-)
Related
I'm using oracle APEX 20.1 and have a report with a column that displays currency values.
Since I'm from Europe I need the currency symbol to be behind the value (unlike the typical $amount format you see often in America).
I achieved this by changing the column's format mask to 'FM999G999G999G999G990D00L'.
This works well so far, but visually I would prefer if there was a whitespace between the end of the number (D00) and the currency symbol (L). Is there a way to insert a static whitespace in this format string?
I already looked through oracle's documentation on currency format strings, but they do not seem to mention such an option to include an always-there whitespace or an arbitrary static character.
Thank you in advance.
You can't include punctuation or character literals in a number mask as you can for dates, unfortunately.
You can include a space as part of the currency symbol itself - that is a string, not a character, and can be up to 10 bytes:
to_char(<number>, 'FM999G999G999G999G990D00L', 'nls_currency='' $''')
though that then uses a fixed currency symbol, not the session value from the L format element; you can get it dynamically from the session parameters:
to_char(
<number>,
'FM999G999G999G999G990D00L',
(
select 'nls_currency='' ' || value || ''''
from nls_session_parameters where parameter = 'NLS_CURRENCY'
)
)
which is a bit ugly. And you might not actually want the session's currency symbol; it might be more appropriate to always use the symbol that's relevant to that data.
And I imagine neither of those will fit in to Apex's numeric column formatting, so you would probably need to do that to_char() call explicitly in your query and have Apex just treat it as a pre-formatted string. (I have no idea how formatting works in Apex - from your description I'm assuming there is somewhere you define a format mask for a column in an interactive grid or whatever; but maybe you are already calling to_char().)
You can also change the currency symbol for the session:
alter session set nls_currency = ' €';
select to_char(123.45, 'FM999G999G999G999G990D00L') from dual;
123.45 €
which might be an option but would affect all currency fields - where the L format element is used - though maybe that's a good thing.
db<>fiddle.
Have existing table called temptable, column largenumber is a NUMBER field, with no precision set:
largenumber NUMBER;
Query:
select largenumber from temptable;
It returns:
-51524845525550100000000000000000000
But If I do
column largenumber format 999999999999999999999999999999999999999
And then
select largenumber from temptable;
It returns:
-51524845525550:100000000000000000000
Why is there a colon?
To test, I took the number, remove the colon, and insert it to another table temptable2, and did the same column largenumber format, the select returns the number without the colon:
select largenumber from temptable2;
It returns:
-51524845525550100000000000000000000
So the colon is not present here.
So what could possibly be in the original number field to cause that colon?
In the original row, If I do a select and try to do any TO_CHAR, REPLACE, CAST, or concatenate to text, it would give me number conversion error.
For example, trying to generate a csv:
select '"' || largenumber || '",'
FROM temptable;
would result in:
ORA-01722 ("invalid number") error occurs when an attempt is made to convert a character string into a number, and the string cannot be converted into a valid number
In a comment (in response to a question from me), you shared that dump(largenumber) on the offending value returns
Typ=2 Len=8: 45,50,56,53,52,48,46,48
From the outset, that means that the data stored on disk is invalid (it is not a valid representation of a value of number data type). Typ=2 is correct, that is for data type number. The length (8 bytes) is correct (we can all count to eight to see that).
What is wrong is the bytes themselves. And, we only need to inspect the first and the last byte to see that.
The first byte is 45. It encodes the sign and the exponent of your number. The first bit (1 or 0) represents the sign: 1 for positive, 0 for negative. 45 is less than 128, so the first bit in the first byte is 0; so the number is negative. (So far this matches what you know about the intended value.)
But, for negative numbers, the last byte is always the magic value 102. Always. In another comment under your original question, Connor McDonald asks about your platform - but this is platform-independent, it is how Oracle encodes numbers for permanent storage on any platform. So, we already know that the dump value you got tells us the value is invalid.
In fact, Connor, in the same comment, gave the correct representation of that number (according to Oracle's scheme for internal representation of numbers). Indeed, just the last byte is wrong: your dump shows 48, but it should be 102.
How can you fix this? If it's a one-off, just use an update statement to replace the value with the correct one and move on. If your table has a primary key, let's call it id, then find the id for this row, and then
update {your_table} set largenumber = -50...... where id = {that_id};
Question is, how many such corrupt values might you have in your table? If it's just one, you can shrug it off; but if it's many (or even "a handful") you may want to figure out how they got there in the first place.
In most cases, the database will reject invalid values; you can't simply insert 'abc' in a number column, for example. But there are ways to get bad data in; even intentionally, and in a repeatable way. So, you would have to investigate how the bad values were inserted (what process was used for insertion).
For a trivial way to insert bad data in a number column, in a repeatable manner, you can see this thread on the Oracle developers forum: https://community.oracle.com/tech/developers/discussion/3903746/detecting-invalid-values-in-the-db
Please be advised that I had just started learning Oracle at that time (I was less than two months in), so I may have said some stupid things in that thread; but the method to insert bad data is described there in full detail, and it was tested. That shows just one possible (and plausible!) way to insert invalid stuff in a table; how it happened in your specific case, you will have to investigate yourself.
I have done the following -
create table test (col char(10));
insert into test values ('hello');
select * from test where col = 'hello'
I have been suggested that the above should not return any result as 'col' is 10 chars, it will be right padded with blanks, so comparing with 'hello' will not return result. But I am getting the result. Can anyone please explain this? I am using 11gR2
Looking at the Oracle Documentation on literals:
Text literals have properties of both the CHAR and VARCHAR2 datatypes:
Within expressions and conditions, Oracle treats text literals as though they have the datatype CHAR by comparing them using blank-padded comparison semantics.
and the documentation of blank-padded comparison semantics states:
With blank-padded semantics, if the two values have different lengths, then Oracle first adds blanks to the end of the shorter one so their lengths are equal. Oracle then compares the values character by character up to the first character that differs. The value with the greater character in the first differing position is considered greater. If two values have no differing characters, then they are considered equal. This rule means that two values are equal if they differ only in the number of trailing blanks. Oracle uses blank-padded comparison semantics only when both values in the comparison are either expressions of datatype CHAR, NCHAR, text literals, or values returned by the USER function.
Since the left-hand side of the comparison is a CHAR(10) and the right-hand side is a text literal then blank-padded comparison semantics are used and 'hello ' = 'hello' is true.
You can see this in the simple example:
SELECT * FROM DUAL WHERE 'hello ' = 'hello';
Update:
[TL;DR] This behaviour has appeared in all versions of Oracle since at least Oracle 7 (released in 1992). I stopped searching for the documentation on releases over two decades old but I expect that you will find that this has been the behaviour in most (all?) versions.
Here is the documentation for the various versions:
Oracle 12c Text Literals & blank-padded semantics
Oracle 11g Text Literals & blank-padded semantics
Oracle 10gR2 Text Literals & blank-padded semantics
Oracle 9 Text Literals & blank-padded semantics
Oracle 8 Text Literals & blank-padded semantics
Oracle 7 Text Literals
You got the correct answer already. Now, you may wonder "how can I force a comparison where the comparison string 'hello' is interpreted as VARCHAR2, so that the query will return no rows?"
The answer is, you must force 'hello' to be seen as VARCHAR2. Like so:
... where col = cast ('hello' as VARCHAR2(10))
(note that the syntax for the cast function requires you to specify the length).
Even though you specify the length of 10, since the cast is as VARCHAR2, the result is really just 5 characters - there is no blank padding of VARCHAR2 values.
Oracle uses "blank padded" comparison semantics in this example because one of the expressions is datatype CHAR and the other expression is a string literal.
There are rules about when Oracle uses blank padded comparison and non-padded comparison semantics. It's covered in the Oracle documentation somewhere.
The suggestion were given (that Oracle would not return a result because the CHAR column would be right padded with spaces) was erroneous.
Could someone please explain to me the difference between the below two Oracle queries? I know they look very similar but the first one returns results and the second one does not. My implementation of the function can be seen below as well.
--Returns results
SELECT *
FROM <TABLE_NAME>
WHERE ID = CAST(<UserID> AS CHAR(2000)); --ID is defined as CHAR(8) in the DB.
--Does not return results
SELECT *
FROM <TABLE_NAME>
WHERE ID = CAST_TO_CHAR(<UserID>); --ID is defined as CHAR(8) in the DB.
--Function definition
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION CAST_TO_CHAR(varToPad IN VARCHAR2)
RETURN CHAR IS returnVal CHAR(2000);
BEGIN
SELECT CAST(varToPad AS CHAR(2000))
INTO returnVal
FROM DUAL;
RETURN returnVal;
END;
/
It almost seems to me that the type is not persisting when the value is retrieved from the database. From what I understand from CHAR comparisons in Oracle, it will take the smaller of the two fields and truncate the larger one so that the sizes match (that is why I am casting the second variable to length 2000).
The reason that I need to achieve something like this is because a vendor tool that we are upgrading from DB2 to Oracle defined all of the columns in the Oracle database as CHAR instead of VARCHAR2. They did this to make their legacy code more easily portable to a distributed environment. This is causing big issues in our web applications because compares are now being done against fixed length CHAR fields.
I thought about using TRIM() but these queries will be accessed a lot and I do not want them to do a full table scan each time. I also considered RPAD(, ) but I don't really want to hard code lengths in the application as these may change in the future.
Does anyone have any thoughts about this? Thank you in advance for your help!
I have similar problem. It turned out that these are the rules of implicit data conversion. Oracle Database automatically converts a value from one datatype to another when such a conversion makes sense.
If you change your select:
SELECT *
FROM <TABLE_NAME>
WHERE CAST(ID as CHAR(2000)) = CAST_TO_CHAR(<UserID>);
You will see that's works properly.
And here's another test script showing that the function works correctly:
SET SERVEROUTPUT ON --for DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE.
DECLARE
test_string_c CHAR(8);
test_string_v VARCHAR2(8);
BEGIN
--Assign the same value to each string.
test_string_c := 'string';
test_string_v := 'string';
--Test the strings for equality.
IF test_string_c = CAST_TO_CHAR(test_string_v) THEN
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('The names are the same');
ELSE
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('The names are NOT the same');
END IF;
END;
/
anonymous block completed
The names are the same
Here are some rules govern the direction in which Oracle Database makes implicit datatype conversions:
During INSERT and UPDATE operations, Oracle converts the value to
the datatype of the affected column.
During SELECT FROM operations, Oracle converts the data from the
column to the type of the target variable.
When comparing a character value with a numeric value, Oracle
converts the character data to a numeric value.
When comparing a character value with a DATE value, Oracle converts
the character data to DATE.
When making assignments, Oracle converts the value on the right side
of the equal sign (=) to the datatype of the target of the assignment
on the left side.
When you use a SQL function or operator with an argument of a
datatype other than the one it accepts, Oracle converts the argument
to the accepted datatype.
Complete list of datatype comparison rules you can explore here
I have a query that has
... WHERE PRT_STATUS='ONT' ...
The prt_status field is defined as CHAR(5) though. So it's always padded with spaces. The query matches nothing as the result. To make this query work I have to do
... WHERE rtrim(PRT_STATUS)='ONT'
which does work.
That's annoying.
At the same time, a couple of pure-java DBMS clients (Oracle SQLDeveloper and AquaStudio) I have do NOT have a problem with the first query, they return the correct result. TOAD has no problem either.
I presume they simply put the connection into some compatibility mode (e.g. ANSI), so the Oracle knows that CHAR(5) expected to be compared with no respect to trailing characters.
How can I do it with Connection objects I get in my application?
UPDATE I cannot change the database schema.
SOLUTION It was indeed the way Oracle compares fields with passed in parameters.
When bind is done, the string is passed via PreparedStatement.setString(), which sets type to VARCHAR, and thus Oracle uses unpadded comparision -- and fails.
I tried to use setObject(n,str,Types.CHAR). Fails. Decompilation shows that Oracle ignores CHAR and passes it in as a VARCHAR again.
The variant that finally works is
setObject(n,str,OracleTypes.FIXED_CHAR);
It makes the code not portable though.
The UI clients succeed for a different reason -- they use character literals, not binding. When I type PRT_STATUS='ONT', 'ONT' is a literal, and as such compared using padded way.
Note that Oracle compares CHAR values using blank-padded comparison semantics.
From Datatype Comparison Rules,
Oracle uses blank-padded comparison
semantics only when both values in the
comparison are either expressions of
datatype CHAR, NCHAR, text literals,
or values returned by the USER
function.
In your example, is 'ONT' passed as a bind parameter, or is it built into the query textually, as you illustrated? If a bind parameter, then make sure that it is bound as type CHAR. Otherwise, verify the client library version used, as really old versions of Oracle (e.g. v6) will have different comparison semantics for CHAR.
If you cannot change your database table, you can modify your query.
Some alternatives for RTRIM:
.. WHERE PRT_STATUS like 'ONT%' ...
.. WHERE PRT_STATUS = 'ONT ' ... -- 2 white spaces behind T
.. WHERE PRT_STATUS = rpad('ONT',5,' ') ...
I would change CHAR(5) column into varchar2(5) in db.
You can use cast to char operation in your query:
... WHERE PRT_STATUS=cast('ONT' as char(5))
Or in more generic JDBC way:
... WHERE PRT_STATUS=cast(? as char(5))
And then in your JDBC code do use statement.setString(1, "ONT");