How to get ASCII/EBCDIC character in IBM db2 iSeries - db2

I want to get character quote(') and double quote(") ASCII/EBCDIC, in IBM DB2 iSeries.
Honestly i don't know what exactly iSeries supports - ASCII or EBCDIC. I'm trying both, but no luck.
http://www.simotime.com/asc2ebc1.htm
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/db2luw/v9/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.db2.udb.admin.doc/doc/r0010873.htm
Example: get (A) character
SELECT * FROM MYTABLE WHERE CUSTOMER_NAME LIKE '%' + CHR(065) + '%'
SELECT * FROM MYTABLE WHERE CUSTOMER_NAME LIKE '%' + CHR(41) + '%'
SELECT * FROM MYTABLE WHERE CUSTOMER_NAME LIKE '%' + CHR(193) + '%'
Gives me this error:
SQL0204 - CHR in *LIBL type *N not found.

If you are simply trying to put a single quote (apostrophe) in your string delimited by single quotes, you need to double it, like this '%''%'. If you want to concatenate, use || (in unix, known as 2 "pipe" characters), not + (plus). You didn't need hex in your example, but if you had, the way to do it would have been x'C1' (an 'A' in EBCDIC).
iSeries uses EBCDIC natively for most things in general. There is a char() function.
Your link to online documentation is for DB2 on Linux, Unix, and Windows. You want the iSeries Information Center at http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/eserver/ibmi.html , or more specifically (depending on which OS release you are using)
for v5r4, see DB2 for i5/OS SQL Reference
for i 6.1, see DB2 for i SQL Reference
for i 7.1, see
DB2 for i SQL Reference

Here's some basic information on SQL character conversion that may be helpful.
This footnote pretty much sums it up:
"Character conversion, when required, is automatic and is transparent to the application when it is successful. A knowledge of conversion is, therefore, unnecessary when all the strings involved in a statement’s execution are represented in the same way. Thus, for many readers, character conversion may be irrelevant"
The CHR function was added in V6R1.
Coding to a specific character set is not good practice however you can perform character translation within an HLL using the QDCXLATE API.

Related

PQgetvalue() strips spaces from result of string_agg()

I have a GNU C++ project that uses the PostgreSQL API and for some reason, it strips spaces from the result of a certain query. Other environments (psql and pgAdmin) don't. The query is:
SELECT string_agg(my_varchar, ', ') FROM my table;
Notice the space after the comma in the delimiter. Instead of 1046976, 1046977 being returned by PQgetvalue(), I get 1046976,1046977. Just for kicks, I tried changing the delimiter to silly things like string_agg(my_varchar, ',:) ' and string_agg(my_varchar, ', :)'. It doesn't strip the space if the space is in the middle of the delimiter.
Again, I don't have this problem if I do the same queries in db browsers like psql and pgAdmin; they don't strip the space in any of those queries.
Yes, I considered the possibility that because the columns from which they extract are varchars, but the data are 7-bit integers, the engine might be confused. I changed the query to something that is truly a varchar, but the spaces were still stripped.
Looking at https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/functions-aggregate.html, I see that string_agg() expects its arguments to be texts or byteas. Well, I never got an error, but to be sure, I tried string_agg(my_varchar::text, ', '::text). It didn't make a difference.
I don't know a great deal about this API, but it doesn't appear to connect to the db with any options, so I don't think there's much to say about the configuration.
I'm running this in GNU C++ v4.9.2 on Debian 8.10. The PostgreSQL engine and API are 9.4.

Unicode normalization in Postgres

I have a large number of Scottish and Welsh accented place names (combining grave, acute, circumflex and diareses) which I need to update to their unicode normalized form, eg, the shorter form 00E1 (\xe1) for á instead of 0061 + 0301 (\x61\x301)
I have found a solution from an old Postgres nabble mail list from 2009, using pl/python,
create or replace function unicode_normalize(str text) returns text as $$
import unicodedata
return unicodedata.normalize('NFC', str.decode('UTF-8'))
$$ LANGUAGE PLPYTHONU;
This works, as expected, but made me wonder if there was any way of doing it directly with built-in Postgres functions. I tried various conversions using convert_to, all in vain.
EDIT: As Craig has pointed out, and one of the things I tried:
SELECT convert_to(E'\u00E1', 'iso-8859-1');
returns \xe1, whereas
SELECT convert_to(E'\u0061\u0301', 'iso-8859-1');
fails with the ERROR: character 0xcc81 of encoding "UTF8" has no equivalent in "LATIN1"
I think this is a Pg bug.
In my opinion, PostgreSQL should be normalizing utf-8 into pre-composed form before performing encoding conversions. The result of the conversions shown are wrong.
I'll raise it on pgsql-bugs ... done.
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/53E179E1.3060404#2ndquadrant.com
You should be able to follow the thread there.
Edit: pgsql-hackers doesn't appear to agree, so this is unlikely to change in a hurry. I strongly advise you to normalise your UTF-8 at your application input boundaries.
BTW, this can be simplified down to:
regress=> SELECT 'á' = 'á';
?column?
----------
f
(1 row)
which is plain crazy-talk, but is permitted. The first is precomposed, the second is not. (To see this result you'll have to copy & paste, and it'll only work if your browser or terminal don't normalize utf-8).
If you're using Firefox you might not see the above correctly; Chrome renders it correctly. Here's what you should see if your browser handles decomposed Unicode correctly:
PostgreSQL 13 has introduced string function normalize ( text [, form ] ) → text, which is available when the server encoding is UTF8.
> select 'päivää' = 'päivää' as without, normalize('päivää') = normalize('päivää') as with_norm ;
without | with_norm
---------+-----------
f | t
(1 row)
Note that I am expecting this to miss any indices, and therefore using this blindly in a hot production query is prone to be a recipe for disaster.
Great news for us who have naively stored NFD filenames from Mac users in our databases.

How to escape string while matching pattern in PostgreSQL

I want to find rows where a text column begins with a user given string, e.g. SELECT * FROM users WHERE name LIKE 'rob%' but "rob" is unvalidated user input. If the user writes a string containing a special pattern character like "rob_", it will match both "robert42" and "rob_the_man". I need to be sure that the string is matched literally, how would I do that? Do I need to handle the escaping on an application level or is it a more beautiful way?
I'm using PostgreSQL 9.1 and go-pgsql for Go.
The _ and % characters have to be quoted to be matched literally in a LIKE statement, there's no way around it. The choice is about doing it client-side, or server-side (typically by using the SQL replace(), see below). Also to get it 100% right in the general case, there are a few things to consider.
By default, the quote character to use before _ or % is the backslash (\), but it can be changed with an ESCAPE clause immediately following the LIKE clause.
In any case, the quote character has to be repeated twice in the pattern to be matched literally as one character.
Example: ... WHERE field like 'john^%node1^^node2.uucp#%' ESCAPE '^' would match john%node1^node2.uccp# followed by anything.
There's a problem with the default choice of backslash: it's already used for other purposes when standard_conforming_strings is OFF (PG 9.1 has it ON by default, but previous versions being still in wide use, this is a point to consider).
Also if the quoting for LIKE wildcard is done client-side in a user input injection scenario, it comes in addition to to the normal string-quoting already necessary on user input.
A glance at a go-pgsql example tells that it uses $N-style placeholders for variables... So here's an attempt to write it in a somehow generic way: it works with standard_conforming_strings both ON or OFF, uses server-side replacement of [%_], an alternative quote character, quoting of the quote character, and avoids sql injection:
db.Query("SELECT * from USERS where name like replace(replace(replace($1,'^','^^'),'%','^%'),'_','^_') ||'%' ESCAPE '^'",
variable_user_input);
To escape the underscore and the percent to be used in a pattern in like expressions use the escape character:
SELECT * FROM users WHERE name LIKE replace(replace(user_input, '_', '\\_'), '%', '\\%');
As far as I can tell the only special characters with the LIKE operator is percent and underscore, and these can easily be escaped manually using backslash. It's not very beautiful but it works.
SELECT * FROM users WHERE name LIKE
regexp_replace('rob', '(%|_)', '\\\1', 'g') || '%';
I find it strange that there is no such functions shipped with PostgreSQL. Who wants their users to write their own patterns?
The best answer is that you shouldn't be interpolating user input into your sql at all. Even escaping the sql is still dangerous.
The following which uses go's db/sql library illustrates a much safer way. Substitute the Prepare and Exec calls with whatever your go postgresql library's equivalents are.
// The question mark tells the database server that we will provide
// the LIKE parameter later in the Exec call
sql := "SELECT * FROM users where name LIKE ?"
// no need to escape since this won't be interpolated into the sql string.
value := "%" + user_input
// prepare the completely safe sql string.
stmt, err := db.Prepare(sql)
// Now execute that sql with the values for every occurence of the question mark.
result, err := stmt.Exec(value)
The benefits of this are that user input can safely be used without fear of it injecting sql into the statements you run. You also get the benefit of reusing the prepared sql for multiple queries which can be more efficient in certain cases.

Find all references to a specific table column in Oracle (10g) [duplicate]

Is there a query I can run to search all packages to see if a particular table and/or column is used in the package? There are too many packages to open each one and do a find on the value(s) I'm looking for.
You can do this:
select *
from user_source
where upper(text) like upper('%SOMETEXT%');
Alternatively, SQL Developer has a built-in report to do this under:
View > Reports > Data Dictionary Reports > PLSQL > Search Source Code
The 11G docs for USER_SOURCE are here
you can use the views *_DEPENDENCIES, for example:
SELECT owner, NAME
FROM dba_dependencies
WHERE referenced_owner = :table_owner
AND referenced_name = :table_name
AND TYPE IN ('PACKAGE', 'PACKAGE BODY')
Sometimes the column you are looking for may be part of the name of many other things that you are not interested in.
For example I was recently looking for a column called "BQR", which also forms part of many other columns such as "BQR_OWNER", "PROP_BQR", etc.
So I would like to have the checkbox that word processors have to indicate "Whole words only".
Unfortunately LIKE has no such functionality, but REGEXP_LIKE can help.
SELECT *
FROM user_source
WHERE regexp_like(text, '(\s|\.|,|^)bqr(\s|,|$)');
This is the regular expression to find this column and exclude the other columns with "BQR" as part of the name:
(\s|\.|,|^)bqr(\s|,|$)
The regular expression matches white-space (\s), or (|) period (.), or (|) comma (,), or (|) start-of-line (^), followed by "bqr", followed by white-space, comma or end-of-line ($).
By the way, if you need to add other characters such as "(" or ")" because the column may be used as "UPPER(bqr)", then those options can be added to the lists of before and after characters.
(\s|\(|\.|,|^)bqr(\s|,|\)|$)

Whats an alternative to having to use sqlite prepared statements to escape characters

I'm working on an iPhone app, which uses the SQLite database, and I'm trying to handle escape characters. I know that there is LIKE ESCAPE to handle escape characters in select statements, but in my application i have SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE actions and i really don't know how to go about handling escape characters.
if you are using sqlite3_exec() all-in-one function,
you dont need to use sqlite3_bind* functions..
just pass the string to sqlite3_mprintf() with %q token
sqlite3_mprintf("%q","it's example");
and the output string is
it''s example
Use FMDB, and then you won't have to. It has built-in parameter binding support, and that will take care of any escaping you need for you.
I believe you simply have to tell SQLite what your escape character is at the end of the SQL statement. For example:
SELECT * FROM MyTable WHERE RevenueChange LIKE '%0\%' ESCAPE '\'
The LIKE will match values such as 30%, 140%, etc. The character I used, \, could be anything.