Atomic, then molecular - was RE: [AccessD] Missing SubQueries in MySQL

Hi John

Which format function did you apply?

/gustav


> I ran into something the other day that I thought I'd share.  The situation:

> I get a database from an insurance company with billing information.  The
> first shot at this, they sent the SSN as a long, which means that the
> leading zeros had already been stripped out by the time I got it.  In order
> to repair the damage, I built up a query on top of the table, with a format
> function call to "format" back in the leading zeros if they were missing.

> Later on, I tried to do an outer join on this "formatted" field to a string
> field in my table.  ALL of the records dropped out, even though most did
> exist in both tables.  IOW, once run through the format, the resulting data
> did not match the real string data in my table - EVER.

> Pretty strange I thought.

> The programmer at the insurance company ended up formatting the data as a
> string and restoring the missing zeros before I ever got the data, so I was
> able to strip out the format statement, whereupon the atomic query started
> working.