Case statement in Oracle 8i

Question

can anyone tell me what to do to make the query below run in Oracle 8i.
thanks
select
case connum
when 'C251234' then 'Good'
when 'C318260' then 'Ok'
else connum end
from names

Answer 1

I believe the confusion arises since CASE and other new functions and features in 8i - analytic functions, NVL2 scalar subquery ..., did not work in PL/SQL in 8i due to it having a different SQL parsing engine. A common work around was to put the offending SQL in a view or execute it as dynamic SQL where PL/SQL would use the database parser.
SQL> select
  2  case when connum = 'C251234' then 'Good'
  3  when connum = 'C318260' then 'Ok'
  4  else connum end
  5  from (
  6  select 'AAAA' connum from dual
  7  union all
  8  select 'C251234' from dual
  9  union all
10  select 'C318260' from dual
11  );
CASEWHE
AAAA
Good
Ok
SQL> var c refcursor
SQL> begin
  2  open :c for
  3  select
  4  case when connum = 'C251234' then 'Good'
  5  when connum = 'C318260' then 'Ok'
  6  else connum end
  7  from (
  8  select 'AAAA' connum from dual
  9  union all
10  select 'C251234' from dual
11  union all
12  select 'C318260' from dual
13  );
14  end;
15  /
case when connum = 'C251234' then 'Good'
ERROR at line 4:
ORA-06550: line 4, column 1:
PLS-00103: Encountered the symbol "CASE" when expecting one of the following:
( * - + all mod null <an identifier>
<a double-quoted delimited-identifier> <a bind variable>
table avg count current distinct max min prior sql stddev sum
unique variance execute the forall time timestamp interval
date <a string literal with character set specification>
<a number> <a single-quoted SQL string>
SQL> var c refcursor
SQL> begin
  2  open :c for
  3  'select
  4  case when connum = ''C251234'' then ''Good''
  5  when connum = ''C318260'' then ''Ok''
  6  else connum end
  7  from (
  8  select ''AAAA'' connum from dual
  9  union all
10  select ''C251234'' from dual
11  union all
12  select ''C318260'' from dual
13  )';
14  end;
15  /
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
SQL> print c
CASEWHE
AAAA
Good
Ok
SQL> select * from v$version where rownum = 1;
BANNER
Oracle8i Enterprise Edition Release 8.1.7.4.0 - Production