Note in-line
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Jonathan Lewis
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The Co-operative Oracle Users' FAQ
http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/faq/ind_faq.html
"Adrian Billington" <billiauk_at_yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:dee17a9f.0310270156.2176bf52_at_posting.google.com...
> Hoping that the predicates are evaluated in a certain order (or
indeed
> forcing it with an ORDERED_PREDICATES hint) just to ensure that all
> text is "numeric" is a flawed approach IMHO.
I don't think your criticism goes far enough - the
flawed approach started with creating a character
column and storing data in it that was supposed to
be numeric data.
>
If you are writing a
> IS_NUMBER function, this surely should handle the obvious
exceptions -
> in this alpha strings. For example, my IS_NUMBER function returns
TRUE
> or FALSE for PL/SQL or 0 or 1 for SQL. It doesn't fail. Which is why
I
> return to my original post and request that we see the function.
>
Your 'is_number() strategy is obviously sensible for procedural
code. Bear in mind, though, that the OP is trying to work around
a problem using an Oracle built-in in an SQL statement.
> Regards
> Adrian
Received on Tue Oct 28 2003 - 09:00:30 CST
