Re: CAST vs. TO_NUMBER or TO_CHAR or TO_DATE or ...

Jared, David,

Thanks for the input. That is helpful.

Any thoughts on the importance of CAST's ANSI compliance vs. the Oracle proprietary nature of the "TO_" functions? My inclination, if given the choice, is to use the ANSI compliant functions. On the other hand, all experienced Oracle hands are very familiar with the TO_ functions having used them forever.

One of the issues I'm facing is that a DBA group I'm working with has exactly the opposite inclination. They would prefer not introducing new syntax -- they will not allow ANSI join syntax (INNER JOIN, OUTER JOIN ..) unless the equivalent join can not be written in traditional Oracle SQL. Their main argument goes along the lines of not "complicating" the environment with multiple syntaxes if it's not needed.

On 10/11/07, Jared Still <jkstill_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/11/07, David Taft <oradbt054_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Looks useful for figuring out things like elapsed time. No doubt there
> > are other ways to do the same thing and I'm sure there are many other uses
> > for cast. I'm glad to have been made aware of this function.
> >
> >
>
> Very nice.
>
> I will have to make use of this to replace a function of mine that does
> the same thing, albeit somewhat less elegantly.
>
> --
> Jared Still
> Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist
>

-- 
Rumpi Gravenstein

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