oracle question

Portal Home > Knowledgebase > Articles Database > oracle question

Posted by plobby, 09-01-2009, 11:37 PM
I have a database where in a table I have a column that is named ID but I want to limit it to strictly two characters where it cannot be over and it cannot be under -- how can this be done?? I have... CREATE TABLE information( id CHAR(2), name VARCHAR2(25) ); /
Posted by cselzer, 09-02-2009, 12:16 AM
I believe... number(2) so... Decent reference http://ss64.com/ora/syntax-datatypes.html Last edited by cselzer; 09-02-2009 at 12:20 AM.
Posted by plobby, 09-02-2009, 12:21 AM
Will that limit me to numbers? Im reading on it and I cant see anywhere where it says that I can use a letter for a character such as NN Sorry -- I dont have access to a database to test right now
Posted by cselzer, 09-02-2009, 12:23 AM
My bad, i misread. You can't use characters with that, only numbers. The reference i posted will help you further im sure. I honestly have never used oracle, and only googled what you asked and looked at a few sites. Looking further, ill edit this post in a few minutes.
Posted by plobby, 09-02-2009, 12:24 AM
Oh woops I was talking about tinyint -- the original before the edit Ill take a look there though - thanks
Posted by mattle, 09-02-2009, 07:01 PM
I haven't used Oracle in about 9 years...doesn't it pad CHAR fields so you'd have something like this: and you get:Technically, that's two characters... I thought that was one of Oracle's differences with MySQL. Technically, the SQL standard requires you to pad CHAR fields to their full length, however, MySQL will simply return a 1 character value. (DB behaviour ref: http://troels.arvin.dk/db/rdbms/#data_types-char) I don't think you want to limit the minimum field length (if you even can), because this would still be possible: I think instead you want to limit the character set for the field. I don't know if Oracle has a method of handling that, but whatever it might be, it seems that it would certainly be easier to handle it in a data abstraction layer.
Posted by cselzer, 09-02-2009, 07:22 PM
I was reading more on oracle.. i enjoy playing with sqlite, mysql, and postgresql. Oracle is too expensive for me to play around with it.. While writing, decided to take a look at the oracle website and found http://www.oracle.com/technology/pro.../xe/index.html Going to install it locally and play around with it.
Posted by mattle, 09-02-2009, 11:51 PM
Cool...I didn't know about that. I'll definitely be playing around with that now! I don't suppose you ran into a comparison table between that version and the enterprise version, or if there are any known limitations? EDIT: Just saw the Data Sheet: 4GB data limit and only executes on one processor (doesn't say anything about dual-core behavior). That will pretty much limit you from using it on any large-scale application, but it does look really useful. I'm still hopeful that Monty's MariaDB comes and blows Oracle out of the water though Last edited by mattle; 09-02-2009 at 11:55 PM.

Add to Favourites Print this Article