Re: Question about Data displayed by SQLplus

In article <35001902.D35_at_markham.longview.nospam.com>, Gunner wrote:

I would check with Oracle about this one, as I know there was a bug in Pro*C which causes the number 1000000 to convert to :000000. This may be another case of incorrect storage of a number.

I believe it is caused by the way that Oracle actually stores numbers.

regs

Neil Chandler

>The existance of the :000 value was discovered by a user who was not
>getting the summary information he was expecting. He traced it down to
>one record and reported it. When we looked up the value in SQLPlus, it
>came out like this:
>
>COLUMN_1 COLUMN_2 COLUMN_3 COLUMN_4 NUMERIC_VALUE
>
>0 2334 124 12 :000
>
>All columns are datatype numeric.
>
>When we tryed searching for other records where numeric_value is = :000
>SQLPlus informed us of our attempt to perform an illegal implicit
>conversion.
>We were able to find other such values by searching for other records
>whose numeric_value was equal to the numeric_value of the above column.
>We deleted them by using the appropriate 'where' statements.
>It's happened a couple of times since then and we found the records in
>much the same way.
>We tryed to insert a value of :000 we could not.
>So the question is:
>
>What the hell is ":000" and what does it mean?
>I'm sorry if I don't seem very versed in the situation; Oracle is not my
>speciality. I would very much appreciate any information anyone can
>lend on the matter.
>Please reply by email or post; just exclude the 'nospam' from the return
>address.
>
>Martin Haltmayer wrote:
>>
>> How do you see the value being ":000"? When you do a SELECT within sqlplus? If
>> so, what do you get when doing "SELECT dump (weird_column)"?
>>
>> Martin Haltmayer
>>
>> Gunner wrote:
>> >
>> > I was wondering if anyone else has experienced this and if anyone has
>> > any idea of what this could mean:
>> >
>> > We have a process which calculates summary information and writes to a
>> > certain table. One of the columns of this table is datatype numeric.
>> > When we use sqlplus to querry this table, we'll occasionally find that
>> > the value in the this column is :000
>> > We have absolutely no idea how this value is getting into this column
>> > (it is not within the scope of our application) and we've not been able
>> > to manually insert a value like this.
>> > Does anyone have any clue whatsoever what this value could indicate?
>> > Please respond by email. Make sure to remove the 'nospam' from the
>> > return address.
Received on Mon Mar 09 1998 - 00:00:00 CST