SQL Oracle turning decimal number into string - sql

I have rather simple question: I have a column with interest rates stored as decimals (e.g. 0,400 , 0,03 etc) and I'd like to turn them into %. I tried following code:
select xy, interest_rate*100 ||'%' as intr_prc
from xyz
but when the decimal is like 0,001 instead of getting 0,2% I get ,2% which looks pretty awful since its hardly noticeable that there is a ',' before the number.
I use pl/sql developer.
Thanks!
Problem is that when I try to add the '%' symbol the number turns into char in throughout the process decimals starting with 0 lose that number (0,1 -> ,1%) etc

select xy, to_char(interest_rate*100,'990.00') ||'%' as intr_prc
from xyz
Whenever conversions are to take place, use the conversion functions to_char or to_number or to_date, depending on what you need so that you avoid implicit conversions. Imnplicit conversions quite frequently lead to errors or undesired results.

Related

SQL Decode format numbers only

I want to format amounts to salary format, e.g. 10000 becomes 10,000, so I use to_char(amount, '99,999,99')
SELECT SUM(DECODE(e.element_name,'Basic Salary',to_char(v.screen_entry_value,'99,999,99'),0)) Salary,
SUM(DECODE(e.element_name,'Transportation Allowance',to_char(v.screen_entry_value,'99,999,99'),0)) Transportation,
SUM(DECODE(e.element_name,'GOSI Processing',to_char(v.screen_entry_value,'99,999,99'),0)) GOSI,
SUM(DECODE(e.element_name,'Housing Allowance',to_char(v.screen_entry_value,'99,999,99'),0)) Housing
FROM values v,
values_types vt,
elements e
WHERE vt.value_type = 'Amount'
this gives error invalid number because not all values are numbers until value_type is equal to Amount but I guess decode check all values anyway although what I know is that the execution begins with from then where then select, what's going wrong here?
You said you added decode(...), but it looks like you might have actually added sum(decode(...)).
You are converting your values to strings with to_char(v.screen_entry_value,'99,999,99'), so your decode() generates a string - the default 0 will be converted to '0' - giving you a value like '1,234,56'. Then you are aggregating those, so sum() has to implicitly convert those strings to numbers - and it is throwing the error when it tries to do that:
select to_number('1,234,56') from dual
will also get "ORA-01722: invalid number", unless you supply a similar format mask so it knows how to interpret it. You could do that, e.g.:
SUM(to_number(DECODE(e.element_name,'Basic Salary',to_char(v.screen_entry_value,'99,999,99'),0),'99,999,99'))
... but it's maybe more obvious that something is strange, and even if you did, you would end up with a number, not a formatted string.
So instead of doing:
SUM(DECODE(e.element_name,'Basic Salary',to_char(v.screen_entry_value,'99,999,99'),0))
you should format the result after aggregating:
to_char(SUM(DECODE(e.element_name,'Basic Salary',v.screen_entry_value,0)),'99,999,99')
fiddle with dummy tables, data and joins.

Converting a large decimal with percentage sign (%) to a smaller decimal

I have the following data that I need to convert to a simple decimal. Currently, it is in varchar format. The data is in a column called Commission%
Commission% (currently Varchar)
Commission% V2 (needs to be decimal)
87.00000%
.87
95.00000%
.95
I have tried the following:
CAST(CAST(CONVERT(FLOAT,REPLACE([Commission %], ''%'', '''')) / 100 AS DECIMAL(10,6)) as DECIMAL(10,6))
BUT I get the following error message Error converting data type varchar to numeric. I was able to use something similar the other day but there were fewer trailing zero's at the time.
This is almost certainly due to bad data which is what you should expect when you store numbers as strings. Here is how you identify them:
SELECT [KeyColumn], [Commission%]
FROM dbo.BadColumnNamesWow
WHERE [Commission%] IS NOT NULL
AND TRY_CONVERT(decimal(20,10), REPLACE([Commission%], '%', '')) IS NULL;
Since you now say there are other patterns, it might make sense to just do this to identify all of the bad data:
SELECT * FROM dbo.BadColumnNamesWow
WHERE [Commission%] IS NOT NULL
AND PATINDEX('%[^0-9.]%', [Commission%]) > 0;
Then clean it up. This should be a lesson in why you never store numeric values in string columns.

Query to ignore rows which have non hex values within field

Initial situation
I have a relatively large table (ca. 0.7 Mio records) where an nvarchar field "MediaID" contains largely media IDs in proper hexadecimal notation (as they should).
Within my "sequential" query (each query depends on the output of the query before, this is all in pure T-SQL) I have to convert these hexadecimal values into decimal bigint values in order to do further calculations and filtering on these calculated values for the subsequent queries.
--> So far, no problem. The "sequential" query works fine.
Problem
Unfortunately, some of these Media IDs do contain non-hex characters - most probably because there was some typing errors by the people which have added them or through import errors from the previous business system.
Because of these non-hex chars, the whole query fails (of course) because the conversion hits an error.
For my current purpose, such rows must be skipped/ignored as they are clearly wrong and cannot be used (there are no medias / data carriers in use with the current business system which can have non-hex character IDs).
Manual editing of the data is not an option as there are too many errors and it is not clear with what the data must be replaced.
Challenge
To create a query which only returns records which have valid hex values within the media ID field.
(Unfortunately, my SQL skills are not enough to create the above query. Your help is highly appreciated.)
The relevant section of the larger query looks like this (xxxx is where your help comes in :-))
select
pureMediaID
, mediaID
, CUSTOMERID
,CONTRACT_CUSTOMERID
from
(
select concat('0x', Replace(Ltrim(Replace(mediaID, '0', ' ')), ' ', '0')) AS pureMediaID
--, CUSTOMERID
, *
from M_T_CONTRACT_CUSTOMERS
where mediaID is not null
and mediaID like '0%'
and xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
) as inner1
EDIT: As per request I have added here some good and some bad data:
Good:
4335463357
4335459809
1426427996
4335463509
4335515039
4335465134
4427370396
4335415661
4427369036
4335419089
004BB03433
004e7cf9c6
00BD23133
00EE13D8C1
00CCB5522C
00C46522C
00dbbe3433
Bad:
4564589+
AB6B8BFC.8
7B498DFCnm
DB218DFChb
d<tgfh8CFC
CB9E8AFCzj
B458DFCjhl
rytzju8DFC
BFCtdsjshj
DB9888FCgf
9BC08CFCyx
EB198DFCzj
4B628CFChj
7B2B8DFCgg
After I did upgrade the compatibility level of the SQL instance to SQL2016 (it was below 2012 before) I could use try_convert with same syntax as the original convert function as donPablo has pointed out. With that the query could run fully through and every MediaID which is not a correct hex value gets nicely converted into a null value - really, really nice.
Exactly what I needed.
Unfortunately, the solution of ALICE... didn't work out for me as this was also (strangely) returning records which had the "+" character within them.
Edit: The added comment of Alice... where you create a calculated field like this:
CASE WHEN "KEY" LIKE '%[^0-9A-F]%' THEN 0 ELSE 1 end as xyz
and then filter in the next query like this:
where xyz = 1
works also with SQL Instances with compatibility level < SQL 2012.
Great addition for people which still have to work with older SQL instances.
An option (although not ideal in terms of performance) is to check the characters in the MediaID through a case statement and regular expression
Hexadecimals cannot contain characters other than A-F and numbers between 0 and 9
CASE WHEN MediaID LIKE '%[0-9A-F]%' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END
I would recommend writing a function that can be used to evaluate MediaID first and checks if it is hexadecimal and then running the query for conversion

Search Through All Between Values SQL

I have data following data structure..
_ID _BEGIN _END
7003 99210 99217
7003 10225 10324
7003 111111
I want to look through every _BEGIN and _END and return all rows where the input value is between the range of values including the values themselves (i.e. if 10324 is the input, row 2 would be returned)
I have tried this filter but it does not work..
where #theInput between a._BEGIN and a._END
--THIS WORKS
where convert(char(7),'10400') >= convert(char(7),a._BEGIN)
--BUT ADDING THIS BREAKS AND RETURNS NOTHING
AND convert(char(7),'10400') < convert(char(7),a._END)
Less than < and greater than > operators work on xCHAR data types without any syntactical error, but it may go semantically wrong. Look at examples:
1 - SELECT 'ab' BETWEEN 'aa' AND 'ac' # returns TRUE
2 - SELECT '2' BETWEEN '1' AND '10' # returns FALSE
Character 2 as being stored in a xCHAR type has greater value than 1xxxxx
So you should CAST types here. [Exampled on MySQL - For standard compatibility change UNSIGNED to INTEGER]
WHERE CAST(#theInput as UNSIGNED)
BETWEEN CAST(a._BEGIN as UNSIGNED) AND CAST(a._END as UNSIGNED)
You'd better change the types of columns to avoid ambiguity for later use.
This would be the obvious answer...
SELECT *
FROM <YOUR_TABLE_NAME> a
WHERE #theInput between a._BEGIN and a._END
If the data is string (assuming here as we don't know what DB) You could add this.
Declare #searchArg VARCHAR(30) = CAST(#theInput as VARCHAR(30));
SELECT *
FROM <YOUR_TABLE_NAME> a
WHERE #searchArg between a._BEGIN and a._END
If you care about performance and you've got a lot of data and indexes you won't want to include function calls on the column values.. you could in-line this conversion but this assures that your predicates are Sargable.
SELECT * FROM myTable
WHERE
(CAST(#theInput AS char) >= a._BEGIN AND #theInput < a.END);
I also saw several of the same type of questions:
SQL "between" not inclusive
MySQL "between" clause not inclusive?
When I do queries like this, I usually try one side with the greater/less than on either side and work from there. Maybe that can help. I'm very slow, but I do lots of trial and error.
Or, use Tony's convert.
I supposed you can convert them to anything appropriate for your program, numeric or text.
Also, see here, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa226054%28v=sql.80%29.aspx.
I am not convinced you cannot do your CAST in the SELECT.
Nick, here is a MySQL version from SO, MySQL "between" clause not inclusive?

sql strip non-number characters to do avg (average) function on column like "$12.39"

I'm using Rails 3 & postgresql
I have column like -> formatted_price: "$17.99"
How can I use avg on this column?
I tried :
#items = Item.where(:user_id => #category.user_id, :asin => [#category.asins[0..-2].split(',')]).select("asin as asin, title as title, avg(sales_rank) as avg_rank, avg(formatted_price) as avg_price").group(:asin, :title)
getting an error cuz of avg(formatted_price) as avg_price
Quick solution:
AVG(CAST(TRIM(LEADING '$' FROM formatted_price) AS NUMERIC))
Better solution: change the column to a more suitable type, eg money or fixed precision numeric, and format it only when needed for display purposes.
Update: seems from the comments that the column is not formatted uniformly the way it was described in the OP. Although you could follow the suggestion from MatBailie and use substring with a regex to extract the numeric portion to get an average, to me it just does not make sense to take an average of a bunch of monetary values in different currencies.
So, either add a where clause to limit the query to those that are in the currency you want, or go back and rethink what you are trying to do.