Re: Casting Varchar to Numeric

On Tue, Nov 27, 2001 at 09:55:41AM -0000, Andy Marden wrote:
> Just undertaking a port of a small Data Warehouse-type batch load
> application from Oracle to PostgreSQL. It's common practice in such a system
> to load data into a staging table whose fields are typically all varying
> text. Then the conversion and mapping of the data is done as a second stage
> into the 'proper' tables.
>
> In Oracle, you can put a text field into a numeric field as long as it
> contains a number and teh conversion will be implicit (or you can simply
> specify to_number(value)) to make the conversion explicitly.
>
> In PostgreSQL, it seems that an error is thrown up if an implicit conversion
> is attempted, and the only explicit conversion seems to be to_number(value,
> format) which doesn't do what's needed generically enough.

If you can't cast it by to_number() in you query (why, are you use COPY?)
you can try define trigger that cast it internaly by to_number() or
other way.

Karel

--
Karel Zak <zakkr(at)zf(dot)jcu(dot)cz>
http://home.zf.jcu.cz/~zakkr/

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