I'm sorry I didn't have time to look at this thread when it was live - a quick check through a small section of its history makes interesting reading. My only contribution, Dan, is that you missed out a couple of classifications: 4) how the designer specified it 5) how Oracle Marketing thinks it works Regards Jonathan Lewis http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/faq/ind_faq.html The Co-operative Oracle Users' FAQ http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/seminar.html Optimising Oracle Seminar - schedule updated July 14th ----- Original Message ----- From: "Daniel Fink" <Daniel.Fink@xxxxxxx> To: <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Friday, July 16, 2004 9:30 PM Subject: Re: to_number question (excellent thread) Umm...I did not really intend it to be humorous... (don't worry, no offense taken) In my current and past research and daily tasks, I am encountering all 3 classifications. My first exposure to this was my work on rollback segments. I quickly realized that there was a lot of mythology and lack of understanding, strongly supported by documentation, papers and presentations. When I really dove in to 9i Automatic Undo, it was reinforced. Have a good weekend, Daniel Jonathan Gennick wrote: > Friday, July 16, 2004, 3:44:19 PM, Daniel Fink (Daniel.Fink@xxxxxxx) wrote: > DF> I might add that there are three classifications on reality > DF> 1) how you want it to work > DF> 2) how the masses believe it to work > DF> 3) how it really works > ---------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -----------------------------------------------------------------