Re: :00000 is stored in NUMBER(12) field, Oracle 7.3.3 Workgroup Server for Windows NT

Anna Sotnichenko <annasony_at_home.com> wrote in message news:37718211.F0B35BE5_at_home.com...
> Did anyone experience something of the kind?
> I'll try to describe the problem.
>
> Application written in Delphi 4 + BDE 5.01 is running on Windows NT 4.0
> workstation and communicating through SQL*Net with Oracle 7.3.3
> workgroup server running under Windows NT 4.0 server.
> Sometimes very strange values are stored in the fields of type
> NUMBER(12)
> In SQL*Plus they look like :00000 (colon followed by 5 zeros) and the
> only way to display the rows containing these values is to issue the
> query:
>
> select * from mytable
> where to_char(myfield) = ':00000';
>
> Being sent to a client application these values are represented by a
> very large float numbers (e+308) and cause "value out of bounds" error.
>
> Hexadecimal representation of this value is FFFF FFFF FFFF EF7F
> I must admit that the same application running under Win95/98
> workstation communicating with the same Oracle server doesn't cause this
>
> problem.
> I don't know who is to blame: Oracle server (very unlikely), Oracle
> SQL*Net, Oracle Call Interface, Borland Oracle SQL Link, BDE, ...?
> I would greatly appreciate your help and advice
>
> Thanks in advance
> Anna Sotnichenko
>
>
>

I saw this when I was trying to use Java and JDBC (oracle JDBC driver) against Oracle 7.3.
This was almost two years ago.
I think the problem is somewhere in the translations of numbers from different types of number representations (oracle is using different IEEE from Java standard), and number round problems.

Finally I solved the problem this way

    insert into my_table ( num_value) values ( to_number('10.5'));

Dumb but working.

Ronen Shachar. Received on Thu Jun 24 1999 - 08:39:34 CDT