Amen to that. Like I said, I just work here, and I hope nobody gets the idea that I am in any way responsible for the (so-called) design. If it's possible to have a normal form with a negative number, then you will find it here. Just to share with you a little recent event: Somebody wanted some entries deleted from a table based on a date range. So the person doing the deleting had just enough command of SQL to be dangerous and deleted from the table where COLUMN between 'date_string_1' and 'date_string_2'. Now, if you will, please note that this is entirely a string operation. For some reason known only to God, the date is stored as a string. And guess what happened. Anyway, it was good experience for me since I got to have rman create a duplicate database on another box and do a point in time recovery. It's been quite a while since I've done that, and I was getting a little bit rusty. > -----Original Message----- > It should not be too astounding. If you design your system > properly and use the > correct column types for the data ( number types for numbers, > date types for > dates ) then you do not run into this issue. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to: oracle-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. -- Archives are at //www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/ FAQ is at //www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html -----------------------------------------------------------------