I'm working in a bulky programing enviornment that makes things like text parsing a real pain taking many extra steps and lots of work. In the past, I've always had MSSQL as the back end where you can query with: select (1+1)and get a result of 2 or select left('The String',4)and get a result of "The " Oracle won't let me do that - it always wants a "from" statement - is there any way around this? Is there an easy way I can pass my text parsing off to the database? Thanks.
I suspect you've now got this solved, but for future reference for anyone stumbling across this thread: The syntax you want is "FROM DUAL" SELECT sysdate FROM DUAL; SELECT left('The String',4) FROM DUAL; DUAL is a magical pseudo table to allow functionality like this, see http://www.adp-gmbh.ch/ora/misc/dual.html
