How's about applications written in ancient awful 4GLs like PowerHouse that
do not handle variable length fields (aka "columns") in their own files, and
therefore do not directly support them in relational DBs either?
Did I mention that this application also RELIES on the OCI bug that allows a
date column to contain a zero (as opposed to the zero-date) that can't be
done thru normal SQL?
SELECT TO_CHAR(lastused,'YYYY') FROM mytables;
TO_CHAR(
---------
2003
0000
0000
2003
2002
Hmmmm...I forgot about that in testing our 9i upgrade...
Rich
Rich Jesse System/Database Administrator
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Quad/Tech Inc, Sussex, WI USA
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2003 10:35 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Wednesday, December 10, 2003, 11:09:27 AM, Gene Gurevich ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
wrote:
GG> Someone told me that Oracle is planning to retire char
GG> variable and therefore they need to be replaced by
GG> varchar2. Has anyone heard anything about it?
I've not heard anything like this. I'm skeptical that it's
true. The ANSI standard defines a fixed-length type
analogous to CHAR, so phasing out CHAR would seem to take
Oracle in a direction *away* from the standard, and that
seems out-of-character. Lately, Oracle seems to have
emphasized compliance with the SQL standard.
Would it even make sense to dispense with CHAR? I admit,
I've never found it too useful, but I'm sure there are
applications that use it. Any phase-out would surely need to
take place over a very long period of time.
What good reasons might an application have to use and
depend on CHAR variables?
Best regards,
Jonathan Gennick --- Brighten the corner where you are
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Author: Jesse, Rich
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