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POStringToDecimal Function - T-SQL Question
 

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  1. POStringToDecimal Function - T-SQL Question
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    <p>I have some dirty input data that is being imported into a raw source table within SQL Server (2008 R2). Fields that are defined as decimal(9,2) or decimal(4,2) by the input provider are coming in as strings, however, the strings do not always conform to the data definition (go figure!).</p> <p>We import the data from flat files into the raw tables,then apply some conversion scripts to insert the 'cleaned' data into tables with the proper data types assigned to columns.</p> <p>For instance:</p> <pre><code>raw_table TotalAmount varchar(12) clean_table TotalAmount decimal(9,2) </code></pre> <p>Now, my question is this. If I want to do some 'basic' cleanup on this, I would want to do it in a function along the lines of:</p> <pre><code>CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[StringToDecimal] ( @conversionString VARCHAR(12) ) RETURNS DECIMAL(9,2) AS BEGIN DECLARE @rsp DECIMAL(9,2) IF ISNUMERIC( LTRIM(RTRIM(REPLACE(@conversionString,' ',''))) ) = 1 BEGIN SET @rsp = ISNULL( CONVERT( decimal(17,6), NULLIF( LTRIM(RTRIM(REPLACE(@conversionString,' ',''))),'') ), 0 ) END ELSE BEGIN SET @rsp = 0 -- or we can return NULL here END RETURN @rsp END </code></pre> <p>However, how could one go about supporting various sized decimals in this mix? Is there a way to parametrize the response type? I considered just returning a decimal of the largest size we generally see, then converting it again on the other end, however, you run into arithmetic overflow issues.</p> <p>Would appreciate any thoughts/insight into solving this one!</p>
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    1. COWhat does the dirty data actually look like? Do you have to do this in the database? Would an external Perl/Python/whatever script or .NET program be easier? Can you clarify what you mean by parameterizing the response type; are you converting _to_ different data types?
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    2. COYou could make the return type sql_variant and convert it outside the function, but something about it smells bad...
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    3. COConverting to different sized decimals. So, in some instances you have DECIMAL(17,2), some columns are DECIMAL(9,5), others are DECIMAL(4,1). In some instances you have spaces in the data, or characters. Example: '10X.781' or '15 8.2'
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