Re: SQL Serious Challenge # 1 - Probably Not Much Fun

Turkbear <john.g_at_dot.spamfree.com> writes:

>>SQL> SELECT REVERSE('FRED') FROM DUAL;

>Any ideas, rumors, etc about why such a function exists ( were Oracle
>coders bored one day?)

It might once have been useful to find the last occurrence of something using instr, instead of the first or Nth. But Oracle's instr can take a negative position argument to search backwards from the end of the string so this no longer applies.

Anyway, at least according to
<http://developer.mimer.com/validator/parser99/index.tml#parser> the reverse function is part of ANSI SQL.

-- 
Ed Avis <ed_at_membled.com>