Re: Oracle datatypes - what to use?

From: Ed E <7161_at_mne.net>
Date: 1996/07/17
Message-ID: <Duo0to.9xM_at_news2.new-york.net>#1/1


"Robert Risholm" <risholmb_at_ccmail.nhq.sony.com> wrote:

>We are building a datawarehouse with Oracle 7.3, thus all fields will be
>read only.
 

>Could someone recommend what datatypes for:
 

>Character data:
 

>Should we use VARCHAR2 for all character type data? Even for the 1 or 2
>byte fields.
>That is what some people have advised. Does putting a maximun length on
>the VARCHAR2
>buy you anything?
 

>Numeric data:
 

>Can we use plain NUMERIC as the data type for all numberic fields.
>Does designating precision and the number of decimals buy you anything?
 

>Thank you

We are also creating a data warehouse, using Excel pivot tables and MSQuery as front-end through ODBC. When a numeric data column was defined simply as NUMBER, we got a "Numeric value out of range" error from Oracle's ODBC driver. This is on Windows95 with 32-bit ODBC driver accessing Oracle 7.1 on HP UX version 10.01 Changing the column to NUMBER(16,2) made the driver error go away. Go figure! Received on Wed Jul 17 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST

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