Oracle-L: RE: Strange Data issue.....

From: Denham Eva <EvaD_at_TFMC.co.za>
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2002 22:53:20 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.004BDE88.20020822225320@fatcity.com>

Tim,

Thanks for this, as it turns out there was extra characters in the column. After alittle investigation I discovered that the data was migrated from an excel spreadsheet using ODBC. I suspect that this "original" data is the problem. Anyway once that was discovered it was easy enough to fix. Once again many thanks.

And thank you to all who gave suggestions. Regards
Denham

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Friday, August 23, 2002 5:38 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Converting to ASCII using the "ASCII()" function will not do any good. Try the DUMP() function on the columns:

select
race||'('||dump(race)||'),'||gender||'('||dump(gender)||'),'||count(*) from pers
group by race||'('||dump(race)||'),'||gender||'('||dump(gender)||')';

...I'll bet DUMP(GENDER) shows a different length with extra characters for some rows...

Original Message ----- To: Multiple <mailto:ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com> recipients of list ORACLE-L Sent: Thursday, August 22, 2002 8:13 AM

Denham,

Your "group by" does not match what you are selecting, thus the results are wrong.

Change your query as follows:

select race||','||gender,count(*)

        from pers 
        group by race||','||gender

Hope this helps.

Tom Mercadante
Oracle Certified Professional

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Thursday, August 22, 2002 8:59 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Hello Gurus,

I have a problem which I hope someone can help me with. I am trying to clean up some data on a table. This table happens to be a personnel table.
In this table there are two columns RACE and GENDER. The select used is :

select race||','||gender||','||count(*)

        from pers 
        group by race, gender;

The result is as follows:

A,F,62 
A,M,613 
A,M,35 
A,,15 
C,F,34 
C,M,198 
C,M,4 
C,,2 
I,F,13 
I,M,69 
I,M,1 
W,F,205 
W,M,972 
W,M,28 
W,,15

The problem is that the result returns double Ms, M indicating Male. As highligthed above
I have tried converting to ascii to see if they are different in anyway but both Ms return ascii 77.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

TIA
Denham Eva
Oracle DBA
In UNIX Land
On a quiet Night, you can hear the Windows machines reboot.

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-- 
Author: Denham Eva
  INET: EvaD_at_TFMC.co.za

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Received on Fri Aug 23 2002 - 01:53:20 CDT