Finding rows that don't contain numeric data in Oracle

Question

I am trying to locate some problematic records in a very large Oracle table. The column should contain all numeric data even though it is a varchar2 column. I need to find

Answer 1

To get an indicator:

DECODE( TRANSLATE(your_number,' 0123456789',' ')

e.g.

SQL> select DECODE( TRANSLATE('12345zzz_not_numberee',' 0123456789',' '), NULL, 'number','contains char')
 2 from dual
 3 /

"contains char"

and

SQL> select DECODE( TRANSLATE('12345',' 0123456789',' '), NULL, 'number','contains char')
 2 from dual
 3 /

"number"

and

SQL> select DECODE( TRANSLATE('123405',' 0123456789',' '), NULL, 'number','contains char')
 2 from dual
 3 /

"number"

Oracle 11g has regular expressions so you could use this to get the actual number:

SQL> SELECT colA
  2  FROM t1
  3  WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(colA, '[[:digit:]]');

COL1
----------
47845
48543
12
...

If there is a non-numeric value like '23g' it will just be ignored.