Hi all,
This might be a generic question/discussion. And this is purely for my learning on how Oracle prioritizes its development on in-built functions.
Well, we have very userful built in functions (http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14200/functions001.htm) evolved during the releases of Oracle ranging from simple to very complex (datamining functions and also xml functions)
But why is that important function of splitting a string has been neglected (may be not the right word) by Oracle.
Being a curious learner and admirer of such a wonderful database techonology called Oracle, I always thought it should have one dedicated string split function.
My question is : Is it something which can be generalized in an inbuilt function?
or
Is it coming in future releases?
Atleast a simple function to begin with like ( I just guessed its name would be splitstr and very basic functionality to do our job of splitting, may be I am wrong in thinking this way, please correct me though.. thanks in advance!)
splitstr('A,B,C',',','col') ---> (delimiter ',' and mode column splitting)
Output: A B C (three separate columns)
splitstr('A,B,C',',','row') ---> (delimiter ',' and mode row splitting)
Output:
A
B
C
----------
If oracle introduces this, there will be lot of code reduced and we may be spared from using connect by or recursive with clause or as a matter of fact even xmltable (with or without tokenizer ) for splitting strings.
What do you have to say about it? you may ignore this naive question if its not worth replying.
And thanks for all who read this discussion!
Cheers,
Manik.