How to break the name column into first,middle,last

Question

hi,
Having a column in a table called employee_name which is
containing the names of employees like:-
employee_name
Syed Azhar Husain
Also having another table having cloumns first_name,middle_name, last_name
I just want to write the query that break my employee_name column into
first name, middle name, last name and
store into table columns first_name, middle_name, last_name respectively
i.e. it should display like
first_name middle_name last_name
Syed Azhar husain
I am using oracle9i database.
Thanks in advance
Azhar

Answer 1

Dear Asuri,
Thanks for quick reply,
your query was working fine when there was one record into the table but when there was more then one record into the table it was giving error "ORA-01427: single-row subquery returns more than one row". So i did small modification in the query as below
SELECT SUBSTR(' ' || name || ' ', INSTR(' ' || name || ' ' , ' ', 1, rn) +1,
INSTR(' ' || name || ' ' , ' ', 1, rn + 1) - INSTR(' ' || name || ' ' , ' ', 1, rn) -1) name
FROM test , (SELECT ROWNUM rn FROM all_objects
WHERE ROWNUM <= ( SELECT distinct(LENGTH(name) - (LENGTH(REPLACE(name, ' ')))) / LENGTH(' ') + 1
FROM test ))
order by name
so above query is working fine with more than one record but there is another problem as i am explaining blow
Suppose there is table called "test" as follows
SQL> select * from test;
NAME
Rajendra kumar jain
syed azhar husain
Chander Shekhar Kumar
when i am putting above query it is giving result as follows
NAME
Chander
Kumar
Rajendra
Shekhar
azhar
husain
jain
kumar
syed
my requirement is that for complete full name like 'syed azhar husain' it should give
name
fist name : syed
middle name: azhar
last name: husain
first name: rejendra
middle name: kumar
last name: jain
first name: chander
middle name: shekhar
last name: kumar