Comments on: What Number Immediately Follows 3,999? Oracle Database Refuses to Answer

By: Log Buffer #255, A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

Log Buffer #255, A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:49:44 +0000

[...] What number immediately follows 3,999? Oracle database refuses to answer to Charles Hooper. [...]

By: jgarry

jgarry — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 22:22:05 +0000

There was additional humor in that link. For example, S could be 7, so it would be USSASCII. Which represents U7757112 or some such since S is ambiguous. Sounds like ships and submarines!

Then there’s K…

By: Damir Vadas

Damir Vadas — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 12:00:14 +0000

When you disable a job for next run it takes 4000 as year value also.

I think Oracle has real y4k bug!

By: Fredrik

Fredrik — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 20:55:59 +0000

If they wanted “line over” I and V, why couldn’t they just have used ASCII art? (format specifier RNAA)

Anyway, must have been strange, new times as they (back in the roman days, before to_char design) quarrel over how to represent extremely huge numbers as several thousands and more.

By: Charles Hooper

Charles Hooper — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 20:46:14 +0000

Joel,

Thanks for the link. Probably a lot of merit in what you wrote about not finding a suitable character in 7 bit ASCII to represent the symbol for 5,000.
_
V = 5000

By: jgarry

jgarry — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 19:12:50 +0000

Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Large_numbers

Perhaps that means whoever came up with the RN format couldn’t figure out how to represent 4000 with US7ASCII.

By: Fredrik

Fredrik — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:59:46 +0000

I did not mean to spoil the humorous tone of the article, and I like that style, so sorry if I did. Instead adding a doc reference seemed to fit the factual side of the article! (Maybe I should have used winking smiley too.)

Luckily as comments seem to be “hidden” from the main article, at least it would not be spoiled right away.

By: Charles Hooper

Charles Hooper — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:21:05 +0000

Fredrik,

Thank you for providing the link to the documentation. As always, I try to welcome readers to further enhance the articles on this blog by providing links to the relevant documentation and well constructed/detailed articles found on the Internet.

This article loses a bit of humor when the documentation is referenced, but at least the humor is documented.

By: Fredrik

Fredrik — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:54:36 +0000

Not sure about the “here first” part…

Of course, it is documented. At least with the following, from Format models description:
> Value can be an integer between 1 and 3999.

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/server.112/e26088/sql_elements004.htm#i34570