How to find the longest record in a table?

Question

Hello,
Is there a function to find the longest record in a table? Or is there a data dictionary that would tell you which record contains the longest data?
I have a table with five columns and one million records. I want to find the record (5 columns combined) with the longest data. Thank you.

Answer 1

Dear watson2000!
The function "VSIZE" tells you the number of bytes in the internal representation of a column which means the size of a value within a column. An example of vsize can be found here:
[http://www.adp-gmbh.ch/ora/sql/vsize.html]
So I think you should try it with this query to get the size of the longest record:
SELECT MAX(VSIZE(column1)) +
       MAX(VSIZE(column2))  +
       MAX(VSIZE(column3))  +
       MAX(VSIZE(column4))  +
       MAX(VSIZE(column5)) AS "Maximum Row"
FROM your_table;To identify the longest record try like this:
SELECT rowid
FROM   your_table
GROUP BY rowid
HAVING  (MAX(VSIZE(column1)) +
         MAX(VSIZE(column2)) +
         MAX(VSIZE(column3)) +
         MAX(VSIZE(column4)) +
         MAX(VSIZE(column5))) = (SELECT MAX(VSIZE(column1)) +
                                      MAX(VSIZE(column2))  +
                                      MAX(VSIZE(column3))  +
                                      MAX(VSIZE(column4))  +
                                      MAX(VSIZE(column5))
                               FROM your_table;)I hope that these two queries could be of help to you.
yours sincerely
Florian W.
Edited by: Florian W. on 23.04.2009 20:53