Question

I’m looking for a function that would sort chars in varchar2 alphabetically.

Is there something built-in into oracle that I can use or I need to create custom in PL/SQL ?

Answer 1

From an answer at http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=1791550 this might work, but don’t have 10g to test on…

SELECT MIN(permutations)
FROM (SELECT REPLACE (SYS_CONNECT_BY_PATH (n, ','), ',') permutations
    FROM (SELECT LEVEL l, SUBSTR ('&col', LEVEL, 1) n
        FROM DUAL
        CONNECT BY LEVEL <= LENGTH ('&col')) yourtable
    CONNECT BY NOCYCLE l != PRIOR l)
WHERE LENGTH (permutations) = LENGTH ('&col')

In the example col is defined in SQL*Plus, but if you make this a function you can pass it in, or could rework it to take a table column directly I suppose.

I’d take that as a start point rather than a solution; the original question was about anagrams so it’s designed to find all permutations, so something similar but simplified might be possible. I suspect this doesn’t scale very well for large values.