Question

I have an Oracle table that contains data on the column ORG_KEY. I need to remove the whitespace after the data and retain the same values for all rows. How can I do this like:

update migadm.MAINRETAIL_MIG 
   set orgkey = select trim (orgkey) from migadm.MAINRETAIL_MIG

Please help

Answer 1

To strip trailing whitespace you can use the rtrim function; for instance:

SQL> select rtrim('   hello     ') from dual;

RTRIM('H
--------
   hello

I’d imagine your update statement would become (notice the extra parenthesis):

update migadm.MAINRETAIL_MIG 
   set orgkey = ( select rtrim(orgkey) from migadm.MAINRETAIL_MIG )

However, this would update every orgkey to be the same so I think you still have a mistake. Maybe you meant something like the following, which will update every orgkey to be the right trimmed version of itself?

update migadm.MAINRETAIL_MIG 
   set orgkey = rtrim(orgkey)