Question

I have this database which contains a varchar.

I want to know which records holds numeric values. I tried REGEXP_COUNT and other but I’m running on 9i and I think this is for 10g >

How can I achieve this?

I tried:

 select to_number( my_column ) from my_table 

But it doesn’t work, because well not all of them are numeric.

EDIT

Background.

This table contains employee id’s, all of which are numeric ( read 1234 or 24523 or 6655 )

The in the initial database load, when the employee id was unknown instead of using something like -1 they entered texts like:

NA, N/A, NONE, UNK, UNKNOW, TEST, EXTERNAL, WITHOUT_ID

Really the main fault is, that column is varchar and not number as it should.

Now, what I try to do, is to get ll the records that are not numeric ( that don’t contain an employee id ) but since that db is 9i, I could not use RegExp

Answer 1

I manage to work around like this:

select my_column
from my_table
where my_column not like '%1%'
and my_column not like '%2%'
and my_column not like '%3%'
and my_column not like '%4%'
and my_column not like '%5%'
and my_column not like '%6%'
and my_column not like '%7%'
and my_column not like '%8%'
and my_column not like '%9%'
and my_column not like '%0%' 

Dirty, but it works. 😉