Question

I have a function that returns the age of a person or ‘Deceased’ if they have died. Because it returns either a number or Deceased the RETURN is a VARCHAR2.

When an age is returned it returns a value like: 72.93541936015413085912743681395289882628. Is there anyway to alter the value within the variable to only return the charaters before the decimal point?

Thanks

Answer 1

cast it as a number:

floor(cast(column as float))

will round it down

ceil(cast(column as float))

will round it up

round(cast(column as float))

will round it

and if you had to send it back to as a string, cast it back

 cast(round(cast(column as float)) as varchar2(50))

but you might need to check for the value ‘deceased’ , so use a case:

select retVal =
case column
 when 'deceased' then 'deceased' -- pushing up daisies
 else cast(round(cast(column as float)) as varchar2(50)) --alive and kicking
end