Oracle® Database SQL Language Reference 11g Release 1 (11.1) Part Number B28286-01 |
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Syntax
Purpose
ORA_HASH
is a function that computes a hash value for a given expression. This function is useful for operations such as analyzing a subset of data and generating a random sample.
The expr
argument determines the data for which you want Oracle Database to compute a hash value. There are no restrictions on the length of data represented by expr
, which commonly resolves to a column name. The expr
cannot be a LONG
or LOB type. It cannot be a user-defined object type unless it is a nested table type. The hash value for nested table types does not depend on the order of elements in the collection. All other datatypes are supported for expr
.
The optional max_bucket
argument determines the maximum bucket value returned by the hash function. You can specify any value between 0 and 4294967295. The default is 4294967295.
The optional seed_value
argument enables Oracle to produce many different results for the same set of data. Oracle applies the hash function to the combination of expr
and seed_value
. You can specify any value between 0 and 4294967295. The default is 0.
The function returns a NUMBER
value.
Examples
The following example creates a hash value for each combination of customer ID and product ID in the sh.sales
table, divides the hash values into a maximum of 100 buckets, and returns the sum of the amount_sold
values in the first bucket (bucket 0). The third argument (5) provides a seed value for the hash function. You can obtain different hash results for the same query by changing the seed value.
SELECT SUM(amount_sold) FROM sales WHERE ORA_HASH(CONCAT(cust_id, prod_id), 99, 5) = 0; SUM(AMOUNT_SOLD) ---------------- 989431.14