[DBI-users] Anyone? Decode?

DECODE() works fine with DBI. It does, however, often add one or
several levels of commas and parenthesis which you will have to be
very careful balancing.
That is exactly true. For a variety of reasons, rows() can not be
trusted until after *ALL* rows have been processed or fetched.
Without seeing the exact SQL and the relevant parts of the script that
uses it, only random guesses are possible. Please use cut and paste
from the original script to be certain we don't just see your typos.

Send the information to the list, not to me personally.

You seem to have this unwavering superstition about DECODE. I guarantee
you, there are no problems using DECODE through DBI. Any problems you are
experiencing are unrelated to DECODE.

DBI doesn't even care about DECODE. It passes off some SQL to Oracle, and
gets some results back. DBI has to deal with placeholders, but other than
that, it does not matter to DBI what is in the SQL.

Oracle doesn't know how many rows it will find until it has returned them
all, because it can start returning rows before it has found them all.

This will select myid and mycol from mytable, and when mycol is NULL, it
will return '?' instead of undef:

$sth->prepare(<<"EndOfSQL");
SELECT myid, DECODE(mycol, NULL, '?', mycol)
FROM mytable
EndOfSQL


Ronald