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Asked: 2026-05-23T13:36:04+00:00

Oracle version : 10g I’m trying to use the MIN function to find the

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Oracle version : 10g

I’m trying to use the MIN function to find the minimum/lowest value of a dataset. The column I’m performing MIN on is a VARCHAR2 column. This column will either contain a numeric value, or a value of ‘–‘ which represents that the value is not applicable.

When performing the MIN() function on the column, the ‘–‘ is always returned.
I want to find a way to exclude the ‘–‘ from being calculated in the MIN statement. I can’t use the WHERE clause in the statement to filter out columns with a ‘–‘ because that would exclude valid data.

Note: This is a huge legacy query (500+ lines) so re-writing this massive query is not really an option.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    MIN(CASE WHEN ColX = '--' THEN NULL ELSE ColX END)

    This is valid in SQL Server and I think will probably work on Oracle as well.

    As a side note, never ever store numeric data in string fields.

    It’s inefficient from a space perspective and you will get some weird results when doing inequality comparisons.

    If you have these rows in your table:

    010
009
1

    The MAX value will be 1 and the MIN value will be 009

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