Question

I have a table in oracle that looks like this:

name              |     type    | nullable  
------------------------------------------
person_name       | varchar(20) | yes  
weight_coeficient | number      | yes
...

How can I figure out how many digits a value of weight_coeficient has ? For example:

3.0123456789 has 11 digits (precision = 11) and 10 digits after the decimal (scale = 10)

Is there any sql command/function that does that, something like GetPrecision( select.. ) that returns 11 ?

Note also that the definition of the table does not specify scale and precision. So as far as I know the maximum precision is applied for all the numbers. So I’m not interested in finding out the precision (= 48) of the definition, but the precision of a specific value in the table. Is that possible just using oracle commands ?

Thank you in advance,
JP

Answer 1

How about….

SELECT LENGTH(TRANSLATE(TO_CHAR(3.0123456789),'1234567890.-','1234567890')) 
FROM dual

The translate simply removes the non numeric characters .-