raw

This one just for fun today. An AskTOM question came in about arbitrary length arithmetic because “NUMBER(38) was not enough”. After some back-and-forth discussions it turned out that the business need under the requirement was managing bit strings. The implementation was currently converting the bits to decimals, hence the need for potentially very large number handling.

The problem was ultimately tackled with using RAW datatypes and holding the bits as raw strings, but I thought it would be interesting to throw together an addition and subtraction facility where the boundaries could exceed NUMBER(38).

So using nested tables, I had some fun with the code below.

Here’s a quirky one for you. It can happen when you are dealing with a partitioned table where the partition key is defined as RAW. To be honest, I really can’t think of a reason why you ever want a table with a raw partition key. (If you have one, please let me know in the comments). Anyway, here’s the demo. I’ll start with a table using the cool automatic list partition facility and load a single row into it.

Just filing this away on my own blog because it seems that I always have hard finding it via google.  Here’s some code to convert raw/hex values into timestamps.  (I’ve come across this need in two situations: [1] bind variables recorded in trace files or sql monitor and [2] hi/low values in column statistics.)

As a query, without creating any objects in the database:

Just filing this away on my own blog because it seems that I always have hard finding it via google.  Here’s some code to convert raw/hex values into timestamps.  (I’ve come across this need in two situations: [1] bind variables recorded in trace files or sql monitor and [2] hi/low values in column statistics.)

As a query, without creating any objects in the database: