I'm curious how you're establishing the value that Oracle is returning. This could possibly just be a problem with the column format not being wide enough for a fully expressed displayed answer. Regards, mwf -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Stefan Kuhn Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2007 8:18 AM To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: bitand functions and NUMBER(20) Hi all, I have got a column defined as NUMBER(20) and want to use bit functions on it. It seems that oracle bitand function is restricted in length. To give an example: select bitand(10846370260800065548,9368617832122679304) from TABLE; returns 9.2234E+18, although the second figure is a subset of bits in first figure. So result should be 9368617832122679304. To make sure my figures are right, I did select 10846370260800065548 & 9368617832122679304; in Mysql and it gave 9368617832122679304. The problem does arise with figures of a certain length. What to do best (apart from changing the column type, which I would like to avoid)? I hope the question isn't too trivia... Stefan -- Stefan Kuhn BSc MA IPB Halle AG Bioinformatik & Massenspektrometrie Weinberg 3 06120 Halle http://www.ipb-halle.de http://msbi.bic-gh.de skuhn@xxxxxxxxxxxx Tel. +49 (0) 345 5582 1474 Fax.+49 (0) 345 5582 1409 -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l