Union in InterBase delivers '-104 Data type unknown'

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I just had to make a triple union (= 3 select statements) which gave me this error message:

Dynamic SQL Error
-SQL error code = -104
-Invalid command
-Data type unknown

Each on its own, the 3 SQL statements worked fine. Also combining the first and second worked.
The 3rd one contained an additional constant string..

The SQL statements are in the box below.. once I added the CAST (expression AS CHAR(128)), it worked.

The puzzling thing is that select statements 1 and 2 already contained those string constants 'P_' and '_A_'... so why would the union of those two work without a cast? Questions over questions, but the triple union below needs the casts - then it works.

	select cast (upper('P_' || p.name || '_A_' || a.name) as char(128)) as fname [..] union select cast (upper('P_' || p.name || '_A_' || a.name) as char(128)) as fname [..] union select cast (upper('P_' || p.name || '_A_' || 'World') as char(128)) as fname [..]

Comments:

2006-03-29, 08:47:05

anonymous from United States

I realized my mistake as soon as I saw this and can explain what went wrong. The union requires the exact same type and LENGTH. When the third select used a constant instead of a.name, it was no longer the same length of 128 or more correctly the length of p.name and a.name.

2006-08-29, 10:05:14

anonymous from Belarus

2006-11-09, 05:36:04

anonymous from Netherlands

After developing for over 12 years with Oracle as the backend i'm spoiled with oracle's implicit type casting. Had been struggling for a couple of hours with a new view before starting googling for the solution. Thanks.

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