Question

Oracle 10g DB. I have a table called s_contact. This table has a field called person_uid. This person_uid field is a varchar2 but contains valid numbers for some rows and in-valid numbers for other rows. For instance, one row might have a person_uid of ‘2-lkjsdf’ and another might be 1234567890.

I want to return just the rows with valid numbers in person_uid. The SQL I am trying is…

select person_uid 
from s_contact 
where decode(trim(translate(person_uid, '1234567890', ' ')), null, 'n', 'c') = 'n'

The translate replaces all numbers with spaces so that a trim will result in null if the field only contained numbers. Then I use a decode statement to set a little code to filter on. n=number, c=char.

This seems to work when I run just a preview, but I get an ‘invalid number’ error when I add a filter of…

and person_uid = 100
-- or
and to_number(person_uid) = 100

I just don’t understand what is happening! It should be filtering out all the records that are invalid numbers and 100 is obviously a number…

Any ideas anyone? Greatly Appreciated!

Answer 1

Another alternative is to combine the predicates:

where case when translate(person_uid, '1234567890', ' ')) is null 
  then to_number(person_uid) end = 100