We have legacy table where one of the columns part of composite key was manually filled with values:
code
------
'001'
'002'
'099'
etc.
Now, we have feature request in which we must know MAX(code) in order to give user next possible value, in example case form above next value is '100'.
We tried to experiment with this but we still can't find any reasonable explanation how DB2 engine calculates that
MAX('001', '099', '576') is '576'
MAX('099', '99', 'www') is '99' and so on.
Any help or suggestion would be much appreciated!
You already have the answer to getting the maximum numeric value, but to answer the other part with regard to 'www','099','99'.
The AS/400 uses EBCDIC to store values, this is different to ASCII in several ways, the most important for your purposes is that Alpha characters come before numbers, which is the opposite of Ascii.
So on your Max() your 3 strings will be sorted and the highest EBCDIC value used so
'www'
'099'
'99 '
As you can see your '99' string is really '99 ' so it is higher that the one with the leading zero.
Cast it to int before applying max()
For the numeric maximum -- filter out the non-numeric values and cast to a numeric for aggregation:
SELECT MAX(INT(FLD1))
WHERE FLD1 <> ' '
AND TRANSLATE(FLD1, '0123456789', '0123456789') = FLD1
SQL Reference: TRANSLATE
And the reasonable explanation:
SQL Reference: MAX
This max working well in your type definition, when you want do max on integer values then convert values to integer before calling MAX, but i see you mixing max with string 'www' how you imagine this works?
Filter integer only values, cast it to int and call max. This is not good designed solution but looking at your problem i think is enough.
Sharing the solution for postgresql
which worked for me.
Suppose here temporary_id is of type character in database. Then above query will directly convert char type to int type when it gives response.
SELECT MAX(CAST (temporary_id AS Integer)) FROM temporary
WHERE temporary_id IS NOT NULL
As per my requirement I've applied MAX() aggregate function. One can remove that also and it will work the same way.
Related
I am trying to extract only the numeric values from a column that contains cells that are exclusively numbers, and cells that are exclusively letter values, so that I can multiply the column with another that contains only numeric values. I have tried
SELECT trim(INTENT_VOLUME)
from A
WHERE ISNUMERIC(INTENTVOLUME)
and also
SELECT trim(INTENT_VOLUME)
from A
WHERE ISNUMERIC(INTENTVOLUME) = 1
and neither works. I get the error Function ISNUMERIC(VARCHAR) does not exist. Can someone advise? Thank you!
It highly depends on DBMS.
in SqlServer you have a limited built-in features to do it, so the next query may not work with all variants of your data:
select CAST(INTENT_VOLUME AS DECIMAL(10, 4))
from A
where INTENT_VOLUME LIKE '%[0-9.-]%'
and INTENT_VOLUME NOT LIKE '%[^0-9.-]%';
In Oracle you can use regex in a normal way:
select to_number(INTENT_VOLUME)
from A
where REGEXP_LIKE(INTENT_VOLUME,'^[-+]?[0-9]+(\.[0-9]+)?$');
MySQL DBMS has also built-in regex
Try this, which tests if that text value can be cast as numeric...
select intent_volume
from a
where (intent_volume ~ '^([0-9]+[.]?[0-9]*|[.][0-9]+)$') = 't'
I'm a newbie learning my way around T-SQL using the AdventureWorks2012 database. I'm using SQL Server 2014, though a solution that would also work with 2008 would be great. I've been given the below exercise:
Write a query using the Sales.SpecialOffer table. Display the difference between the MinQty and MaxQty columns along with the SpecialOfferID and Description columns.
Thing is, MaxQty allows for null values, so I'm trying to come up with a real world solution for an output that doesn't involve leaving nulls in there. However, when I try to use coalesce to return 'No Max' (yes, I get that I could just leave NULL in there but I'm trying to see if I can figure this out), I get the message that the varchar value 'No Max' couldn't be converted to data type int. I'm assuming this is because MaxQty - MinQty as an int takes precedence?
select
specialofferid
, description
, coalesce((maxqty - minqty),'No Max') 'Qty_Difference'
from
sales.specialoffer;
Error:
Msg 245, Level 16, State 1, Line 135
Conversion failed when converting the varchar value 'No max' to data type int.
I thought about just returning a nonsense integer (0 or a negative) but that doesn't seem perfect - if return 0 I'm obscuring situations where the result is actually zero, etc.
Thoughts?
You just need to make sure that all the parameters of the COALESCE function call have consistent data types. Because you can't get around the fact No Max is a string, then you have to make sure that the maxqty - minqty part is also treated as a string by casting the expression.
select specialofferid
, description
, coalesce(cast(maxqty - minqty as varchar),'No Max') 'Qty_Difference'
from sales.specialoffer;
EDIT: A few more details on the cause of the error
Without the explicit cast, the reason why the COALESCE function attempts to convert the No Max string to an int can be explained by the following documented rule:
Data type determination of the resulting expression is different. ISNULL uses the data type of the first parameter, COALESCE follows the CASE expression rules and returns the data type of value with the highest precedence.
And if you check the precedence of the different types, as documented here, then you will see that int has higher precedence than varchar.
So as soon as you have a mix of data types in the call to COALESCE, SQL Server will try to convert all mismatching parameters to the data type with highest precedence, in this case int. To override that default behavior, explicit type casting is required.
I would use a case statement to so you can do stuff you want.
select specialofferid
, description
, CASE
WHEN maxqty is null THEN 'No Max'
ELSE (maxqty - minqty) 'Qty_Difference'
END
from sales.specialoffer;
I have a char(12) column with data such as:
000000004012
000000615737
000000000012
000000000100
And I need to convert it to this:
4012
615737
12
100
My initial thought is to use string manipulation, such as CHARINDEX. However, I would need to search from left-to-right for the first occurrence of NOT 0. How can I accomplish this in SQL Server?
By the way, why did you store tha data in char? but to answer your question, try this,
SELECT CAST(colName AS INT)
or
SELECT CAST('999999999999' AS NUMERIC(12,0))
SQLFiddle Demo
If we talk about numeric data, it is sufficient to do cast(column as int) or as any other numeric data type.
In MS SQL, I need a approach to determine the largest scale being used by the rows for a certain decimal column.
For example Col1 Decimal(19,8) has a scale of 8, but I need to know if all 8 are actually being used, or if only 5, 6, or 7 are being used.
Sample Data:
123.12345000
321.43210000
5255.12340000
5244.12345000
For the data above, I'd need the query to either return 5, or 123.12345000 or 5244.12345000.
I'm not concerned about performance, I'm sure a full table scan will be in order, I just need to run the query once.
Not pretty, but I think it should do the trick:
-- Find the first non-zero character in the reversed string...
-- And then subtract from the scale of the decimal + 1.
SELECT 9 - PATINDEX('%[1-9]%', REVERSE(Col1))
I like #Michael Fredrickson's answer better and am only posting this as an alternative for specific cases where the actual scale is unknown but is certain to be no more than 18:
SELECT LEN(CAST(CAST(REVERSE(Col1) AS float) AS bigint))
Please note that, although there are two explicit CAST calls here, the query actually performs two more implicit conversions:
As the argument of REVERSE, Col1 is converted to a string.
The bigint is cast as a string before being used as the argument of LEN.
SELECT
MAX(CHAR_LENGTH(
SUBSTRING(column_name::text FROM '\.(\d*?)0*$')
)) AS max_scale
FROM table_name;
*? is the non-greedy version of *, so \d*? catches all digits after the decimal point except trailing zeros.
The pattern contains a pair of parentheses, so the portion of the text that matched the first parenthesized subexpression (that is \d*?) is returned.
References:
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.6/static/sql-createcast.html
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.6/static/functions-matching.html
Note this will scan the entire table:
SELECT TOP 1 [Col1]
FROM [Table]
ORDER BY LEN(PARSENAME(CAST([Col1] AS VARCHAR(40)), 1)) DESC
I need to order a select query using a varchar column, using numerical and text order. The query will be done in a java program, using jdbc over postgresql.
If I use ORDER BY in the select clause I obtain:
1
11
2
abc
However, I need to obtain:
1
2
11
abc
The problem is that the column can also contain text.
This question is similar (but targeted for SQL Server):
How do I sort a VARCHAR column in SQL server that contains words and numbers?
However, the solution proposed did not work with PostgreSQL.
Thanks in advance, regards,
I had the same problem and the following code solves it:
SELECT ...
FROM table
order by
CASE WHEN column < 'A'
THEN lpad(column, size, '0')
ELSE column
END;
The size var is the length of the varchar column, e.g 255 for varying(255).
You can use regular expression to do this kind of thing:
select THECOL from ...
order by
case
when substring(THECOL from '^\d+$') is null then 9999
else cast(THECOL as integer)
end,
THECOL
First you use regular expression to detect whether the content of the column is a number or not. In this case I use '^\d+$' but you can modify it to suit the situation.
If the regexp doesn't match, return a big number so this row will fall to the bottom of the order.
If the regexp matches, convert the string to number and then sort on that.
After this, sort regularly with the column.
I'm not aware of any database having a "natural sort", like some know to exist in PHP. All I've found is various functions:
Natural order sort in Postgres
Comment in the PostgreSQL ORDER BY documentation