Re: Oracle Decode Function

That would get ugly in a real hurry! Oracle does get around the issue of
parameter datatypes by having automatic datatype conversions, more or
less, everything becomes a varchar2. The only real attractants to
implementing a DECODE() function is that it's one less thing to convert
when migrating apps from Oracle and, unfortunately, this is also a piece
of the SQL*Net compatibility that I'm looking into doing!

Tom Lane wrote:
> Marc Lavergne <mlavergne-pub(at)richlava(dot)com> writes:
>
>>If you're asking about whether a custom function can have vararg
>>parameters, the answer appears to depend on the CREATE FUNCTION
>>syntax.
>
>
> Can't do it, though you could imagine creating a family of functions
> of the same name and different numbers of parameters. Trying to
> emulate DECODE this way would have a much worse problem: what's the
> datatype of the parameters? (Or the result?)
>
> Use CASE; it does more than DECODE *and* is ANSI-standard.
>
> regards, tom lane
>
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