Commas and decimal places to signify decimal point

From: Peter Nolan <peter_at_peternolan.com>
Date: 17 Nov 2005 09:27:56 -0800
Message-ID: <1132248476.884219.226590@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>

Hi All,
I came across an unusual problem today....

We are just getting started loading incoming files into a staging area to analyse source data for a DW build.

I am sending data into a database (that I didn't set up and am not the dba for) using ODBC calls where the ODBC call sends a character string representation of the value to the oracle driver and oracle performs the implicit data conversion....

I didn't notice it...but yesterday I loaded some data where the number
format was nnn,nn . Today we got some data from a different country in
the format nnn.nn . And this gets invalid number format.

It looks like the database is set up to have just ',' recognised as the decimal point.

Is there any way to recognise both ',' and '.' as a decimal point or must I ensure that these things are consistently just one value for the target database?

(Yes, I have always just used '.' for the decimal point)

Thanks
Peter
www.peternolan.com Received on Thu Nov 17 2005 - 11:27:56 CST