Russ - What do you have in mind? Oracle stores numbers in its own format in
its own datafiles. Are you looking to hack the Oracle datafiles? Or do you
have an input file in packed decimal format that your are looking at loading
into Oracle? If you could tell us the objective you are seeking to
SQL*Loader understands how to translate PACKED and
ZONED DECIMAL format; pretty sure that PRO*Cobol does as well, though I
don't do Cobol...
If you're interested in conversion routines, I've a
"C" function named "ptof()" that converts packed-decimal to
floating-point; wrote it 10 years ago
Oracle uses a proprietary field format for
numbers. I dont think it is
packed decimal, however, I believe most of the Cobol or PL/I programs I wrote
against Oracle RDBMS on the mainframe used Packed Decimal to represent number
fields. You can use the SIGN
function to determine the sign of
