I'm constantly learning new things. I think it is human nature to do so. The sad thing is that a lot of what I learn either becomes trivialized or forgotten, so I don't appreciate that a discovery was made after the fact.
I'd like to change that. I'd like to share my little eye-opening discoveries with whoever has the time to read about them. Thus, I've started a new category on this blog that I call "Knowledge++".
Today's discovery involves ORACLE... you know, the other RDBMS out there in the wild. :-)
My current project uses an Oracle 10g backend. The other day, I realized that PL/SQL does not have a RIGHT() function, as T-SQL does. The alternative method used by Oracle to return the rightmost characters of a string is to use the SUBSTR() function, specifying a negative number for the 'length' parameter.
SUBSTR('123456789', -3) would give you '789'!
My discovery source: http://www.ispirer.com/doc/sqlways38/Output/SQLWays-1-069.html