I'm trying to execute the following query:
DELETE FROM table_name WHERE ID>9;
But i can't since the 'ID' field is of type 'varchar'.
How can i cast it to 'int' and have it act properly? (deleting all rows with ID greater than 9 rather than converting it to a numeric varchar value)
I don't know why you would store a numeric value as a string. You might want something more like:
DELETE FROM table_name
WHERE regexp_matches(ID, '^[1-9][0-9]');
This will delete from the table any id that starts with two digits, where the first is not 0. If you attempt a conversion, then you might get a conversion error if not all ids are numbers. This will also work for long numbers that would overflow an int (although numeric would fix that problem).
EDIT:
For a general solution, I think I would write it as:
where (case when regexp_matches(id, '^[0-9]+$')
then id::numeric
end) > 70000
The case should prevent any error on non-numeric ids.
How to show type after decode expression. I,ve following query , and I need know column type of expression decode
Current Query:
select decode(column1,column2,2,'3') result from tablename
Desired Query:
select decode(column1,column2,2,'3') result,calculationoftype.... columntype from tablename
I think you are confused about something. decode() is an expression and it only returns one type. In your case, that type is number.
As the documentation explains:
Oracle automatically converts the return value to the same datatype as
the first result. If the first result has the datatype CHAR or if the
first result is null, then Oracle converts the return value to the
datatype VARCHAR2.
In your case the first result is a number, so the return type is a number.
A very easy one for someone,
The following insert is giving me the
ORA-01722: invalid number
why?
INSERT INTO CUSTOMER VALUES (1,'MALADY','Claire','27 Smith St Caulfield','0419 853 694');
INSERT INTO CUSTOMER VALUES (2,'GIBSON','Jake','27 Smith St Caulfield','0415 713 598');
INSERT INTO CUSTOMER VALUES (3,'LUU','Barry','5 Jones St Malvern','0413 591 341');
INSERT INTO CUSTOMER VALUES (4,'JONES','Michael','7 Smith St Caulfield','0419 853 694');
INSERT INTO CUSTOMER VALUES (5,'MALADY','Betty','27 Smith St Knox','0418 418 347');
An ORA-01722 error occurs when an attempt is made to convert a character string into a number, and the string cannot be converted into a number.
Without seeing your table definition, it looks like you're trying to convert the numeric sequence at the end of your values list to a number, and the spaces that delimit it are throwing this error. But based on the information you've given us, it could be happening on any field (other than the first one).
Suppose tel_number is defined as NUMBER - then the blank spaces in this provided value cannot be converted into a number:
create table telephone_number (tel_number number);
insert into telephone_number values ('0419 853 694');
The above gives you a
ORA-01722: invalid number
Here's one way to solve it. Remove non-numeric characters then cast it as a number.
cast(regexp_replace('0419 853 694', '[^0-9]+', '') as number)
Well it also can be :
SELECT t.col1, t.col2, ('test' + t.col3) as test_col3
FROM table t;
where for concatenation in oracle is used the operator || not +.
In this case you get : ORA-01722: invalid number ...
This is because:
You executed an SQL statement that tried to convert a string to a
number, but it was unsuccessful.
As explained in:
Oracle/PLSQL: ORA-01722 Error.
To resolve this error:
Only numeric fields or character fields that contain numeric values
can be used in arithmetic operations. Make sure that all expressions
evaluate to numbers.
As this error comes when you are trying to insert non-numeric value into a numeric column in db it seems that your last field might be numeric and you are trying to send it as a string in database. check your last value.
Oracle does automatic String2number conversion, for String column values! However, for the textual comparisons in SQL, the input must be delimited as a String explicitly: The opposite conversion number2String is not performed automatically, not on the SQL-query level.
I had this query:
select max(acc_num) from ACCOUNTS where acc_num between 1001000 and 1001999;
That one presented a problem: Error: ORA-01722: invalid number
I have just surrounded the "numerical" values, to make them 'Strings', just making them explicitly delimited:
select max(acc_num) from ACCOUNTS where acc_num between '1001000' and '1001999';
...and voilà: It returns the expected result.
edit:
And indeed: the col acc_num in my table is defined as String. Although not numerical, the invalid number was reported. And the explicit delimiting of the string-numbers resolved the problem.
On the other hand, Oracle can treat Strings as numbers. So the numerical operations/functions can be applied on the Strings, and these queries work:
select max(string_column) from TABLE;
select string_column from TABLE where string_column between '2' and 'z';
select string_column from TABLE where string_column > '1';
select string_column from TABLE where string_column <= 'b';
In my case the conversion error was in functional based index, that I had created for the table.
The data being inserted was OK. It took me a while to figure out that the actual error came from the buggy index.
Would be nice, if Oracle could have gave more precise error message in this case.
If you do an insert into...select * from...statement, it's easy to get the 'Invalid Number' error as well.
Let's say you have a table called FUND_ACCOUNT that has two columns:
AID_YEAR char(4)
OFFICE_ID char(5)
And let's say that you want to modify the OFFICE_ID to be numeric, but that there are existing rows in the table, and even worse, some of those rows have an OFFICE_ID value of ' ' (blank). In Oracle, you can't modify the datatype of a column if the table has data, and it requires a little trickery to convert a ' ' to a 0. So here's how to do it:
Create a duplicate table: CREATE TABLE FUND_ACCOUNT2 AS SELECT * FROM FUND_ACCOUNT;
Delete all the rows from the original table: DELETE FROM FUND_ACCOUNT;
Once there's no data in the original table, alter the data type of its OFFICE_ID column: ALTER TABLE FUND_ACCOUNT MODIFY (OFFICE_ID number);
But then here's the tricky part. Because some rows contain blank OFFICE_ID values, if you do a simple INSERT INTO FUND_ACCOUNT SELECT * FROM FUND_ACCOUNT2, you'll get the "ORA-01722 Invalid Number" error. In order to convert the ' ' (blank) OFFICE_IDs into 0's, your insert statement will have to look like this:
INSERT INTO FUND_ACCOUNT (AID_YEAR, OFFICE_ID) SELECT AID_YEAR, decode(OFFICE_ID,' ',0,OFFICE_ID) FROM FUND_ACCOUNT2;
I have found that the order of your SQL statement parameters is also important and the order they are instantiated in your code, this worked in my case when using "Oracle Data Provider for .NET, Managed Driver".
var sql = "INSERT INTO table (param1, param2) VALUES (:param1, :param2)";
...
cmd.Parameters.Add(new OracleParameter("param2", Convert.ToInt32("100")));
cmd.Parameters.Add(new OracleParameter("param1", "alpha")); // This should be instantiated above param1.
Param1 was alpha and param2 was numeric, hence the "ORA-01722: invalid number" error message. Although the names clearly shows which parameter it is in the instantiation, the order is important. Make sure you instantiate in the order the SQL is defined.
For me this error was a bit complicated issue.
I was passing a collection of numbers (type t_numbers is table of number index by pls_integer;) to a stored procedure. In the stored proc there was a bug where numbers in this collection were compared to a varchar column
select ... where ... (exists (select null from table (i_coll) ic where ic.column_value = varchar_column))
Oracle should see that ic.column_value is integer so shouldn't be compared directly to varchar but it didn't (or there is trust for conversion routines).
Further complication is that the stored proc has debugging output, but this error came up before sp was executed (no debug output at all).
Furthermore, collections [<empty>] and [0] didn't give the error, but for example [1] errored out.
The ORA-01722 error is pretty straightforward. According to Tom Kyte:
We've attempted to either explicity or implicity convert a character string to a number and it is failing.
However, where the problem is is often not apparent at first. This page helped me to troubleshoot, find, and fix my problem. Hint: look for places where you are explicitly or implicitly converting a string to a number. (I had NVL(number_field, 'string') in my code.)
This happened to me too, but the problem was actually different: file encoding.
The file was correct, but the file encoding was wrong. It was generated by the export utility of SQL Server and I saved it as Unicode.
The file itself looked good in the text editor, but when I opened the *.bad file that the SQL*loader generated with the rejected lines, I saw it had bad characters between every original character. Then I though about the encoding.
I opened the original file with Notepad++ and converted it to ANSI, and everything loaded properly.
In my case it was an end of line problem, I fixed it with dos2unix command.
In my case I was trying to Execute below query, which caused the above error ( Note : cus_id is a NUMBER type column)
select *
from customer a
where a.cus_id IN ('115,116')
As a solution to the caused error, below code fragment(regex) can be used which is added in side IN clause (This is not memory consuming as well)
select *
from customer a
where a.cus_id IN (select regexp_substr (
com_value,
'[^,]+',
1,
level
) value
from (SELECT '115,116' com_value
FROM dual)rws
connect by level <=
length ( com_value ) - length ( replace ( com_value, ',' ) ) + 1)
try this as well, when you have a invalid number error
In this
a.emplid is number and b.emplid is an varchar2 so if you got to convert one of the sides
where to_char(a.emplid)=b.emplid
You can always use TO_NUMBER() function in order to remove this error.This can be included as INSERT INTO employees phone_number values(TO_NUMBER('0419 853 694');
I found this odd behavior and I'm breaking my brains with this... anyone has any ideas?
Oracle 10g:
I have two different tables, both have this column named "TESTCOL" as Varchar2(10), not nullable.
If I perform this query on table1, i get the proper results:
select * from table1 where TESTCOL = 1234;
Note that I'm specifically not placing '1234'... it's not a typo, that's a dynamic generated query and I will try not to change it (at least not in the near future).
But, if I run the same query, on table2, I get this error message:
ORA-01722: Invalid number
Both queries are run on the same session, same database.
I've been joining these two tables by that column and the join works ok, the only problem shows whenever I try to use that condition.
Any ideas on what could be different from one table to the other?
Thanks in advance.
If TESTCOL contains non-numbers, then Oracle might run into problems when converting TESTCOL entries to numbers. Because, what it does internally, is this:
select * from table1 where TO_NUMBER(TESTCOL) = 1234;
If you're so sure that 1234 cannot be expressed as a VARCHAR literal, then try this instead, in order to compare varchar values, rather than numeric ones:
select * from table1 where TESTCOL = TO_CHAR(1234);
Well obvious TABLE2.TESTCOL contains values which are not numbers. Comparing a string to a numeric literal generates an implicit conversion. So any value in TESTCOL hich cannot be cast to a number will hurl ORA-1722.
It doesn't hit you where you compare the two tables because you are comparing strings.
So you have a couple of options, neiher of which you will like. The most obvious answer is to clean the data so TABLE2 hdoesn't contain non-numerics. Ideally you should combine this with changing the column to a numeric data type. Otherwise you can alter the generator so it produces code you can run against a shonky data model. In this case that means wrapping literals in quote marks if the mapped column has a character data type.
You are hitting the perils of implicit typecasting here.
With the expression testcol = 1234 you state that you want to treat testcol as a numeric column, so Oracle tries to convert all values in that column to a number.
The ORA-01722 occurs because apparently at least one value in that column is not a number.
Even though you claim that this is "not a typo" it indeed is one. It's a syntactical error.
You will have to declare your parameter as a string literal using single quotes: where testcol = '1234'
Creating a correct condition is the only solution to your problem.
The following should work. Just replace the "your where".
select *
from table1
where (select TO_NUMBER(TESTCOL)
from table2
where "your where") = 1234;
I have a table with an ID field of INT Type.
I am doing some data validation and noticed that
SELECT * from mytable where id=94
and
SELECT * from mytable where id='94'
works perfectly, but if I use
SELECT * from mytable where id='94dssdfdfgsdfg2'
it gave me the same result! How is this possible?
it would be possible if the internal implementation of MySql's string to int function dropped all characters from the string after the first non-numeric when parsing it.
What you've witnessed is called "implicit data conversion".
Implicit, the opposite of "explicit", means that the data type is automatically converted to the data type of the column being compared when possible. In this case, MYTABLE.id is an INTeger data type so MySQL will convert the value being compared to an INT if it is enclosed in single quotes (string based data type to SQL).
Because of the conversion, the data is getting truncated at the end of the last numeric character after starting from the leftmost position in the string.