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by Daniel Berger.
Original Post: PostgreSQL 1, Oracle 0
Feed Title: Testing 1,2,3...
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I'm having to deal with some LONG string data in an Oracle database. It's raw XML, and there are cases where we need to parse out the value of a specific tag, replace that value, then insert it back into the database.
I forgot just how awful Oracle's string handling functions are. No regular expressions. We have to resort the tried and true method of INSTR() + SUBSTR() combinations. What should be a single line is now five. Blech. I know there's an XML package in Oracle, but it looks even more difficult to parse data than the method we used. Double blech.
Needing to check the data afterwards, I tried to run a LIKE on a LONG datatype. Whoops! You can't do that in Oracle. You'll have to create a temporary LOB table and search against that. How 1980's of them.
PostgreSQL, on the other hand, has a plethora of string functions and allows regular expressions in its substring() function.
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