Comments on: The CASE against DECODE and the Misery of Penalties http://mikesmithers.wordpress.com/2012/07/05/the-case-against-decode-and-the-misery-of-penalties/ Oracle - for when it was like that when you got there Tue, 18 Jun 2013 22:53:09 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: mikesmithers http://mikesmithers.wordpress.com/2012/07/05/the-case-against-decode-and-the-misery-of-penalties/#comment-20209 Mon, 09 Jul 2012 19:14:24 +0000 http://mikesmithers.wordpress.com/?p=1409#comment-20209 Jeff,

thanks for pointing that out. Post suitably amended. I am now sitting down to a large helping of humble-pie. Honestly, now England finally has a decent cricket team, I had hoped to stay off the stuff for a while.

Mike

]]> By: Jeffrey Kemp http://mikesmithers.wordpress.com/2012/07/05/the-case-against-decode-and-the-misery-of-penalties/#comment-20180 Mon, 09 Jul 2012 05:02:46 +0000 http://mikesmithers.wordpress.com/?p=1409#comment-20180 I generally prefer CASE as well, but your reason for avoiding DECODE isn’t quite accurate in this instance – you got ORA-00936: missing expression because you forgot to surround the subquery in parentheses, e.g.

SELECT s.team_name,
DECODE(
(SELECT c.back_yn
FROM chances c
WHERE c.team_name = s.team_name),
‘Y’, ‘Looking good for them’,
‘Years of hurt ++’) as “Hansen says”
FROM shootouts

]]>