Question

I’m an experienced programmer, but relatively new to SQL. We’re using Oracle 10 and 11. I have a system in place using SQL that combines actual rows with virtual rows (e.g. “SELECT 1 from DUAL”) doing unions and intersects as needed, which all seems to work.

My problem is that I need to combine this system which is expecting rows of data, with new data that will have the data in (let’s say for simplification) comma delimited strings.

So I think what I need is a way to convert a string like: “5,6,7,8” into 4 rows with one column each, with “5” in the first row, “6” in the second, etc. In other languages, I’d do a “Split” with comma as the delimiter. Of course, the data won’t always have 4 entries.

There’s a second question, but I’ll ask it separately. But I suspect it will simplify things, if possible, if the solution to the above could be used as a table in another SQL statement (i.e., to work with my existing system). Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

You should really extract that comma separated string into an outside program in any language, split it up, bulk-load it into a temp table, and use that temp table in your queries.

If you absolutely HAVE to do it in SQL, this article shows you how to do so:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/code/tips2007/070907.html