Here’s another post in the Oracle For SQL Server Developers series (vol1, vol2). The goal with this post is to help you get a feel for some common column data types in Oracle.
Tip #16: Data Type Equivalents for Numbers
| SQL Server | Oracle |
| int | NUMBER |
| float, real | NUMBER(precision, scale) |
In Oracle, a number can be a maximum of 38 digits. Precision indicates the number of digits on the left of the decimal point. Scale indicates the number of digits on the right of the decimal point.
A cool thing in Oracle is that the Scale can be negative. So if you have a NUMBER(7, -2) column and you insert 9231234.83 the value that will get stored is 9231200. (Hint: that zeroed out the tens and singles column.)
Tip #17: Date Equivalents
| SQL Server | Oracle |
| datetime | DATE |
Values can be from 1/1/4712 BC to 12/31/9999. The standard format is DD-MON-YY and conversion can be done using the TO_DATE() function.
Tip #18: Binary Data Column Equivalent
| SQL Server | Oracle |
| image | BLOB |
BLOB stores binary data (images, files, other raw data) and the maximum size is 128 terabytes.
Stay tuned. There are at least 2 more posts coming in this Oracle For SQL Server Developers series!
-Ben
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