Occasional Stray Decimal Point In Number Field

[billbois]

I have a sporadic issue with a field that's defined in Teradata as Decimal(3,0). There are fifteen possible values, and they're the numbers 1 through 15. If I do a SELECT statement in Teradata SQL Assistant, I get those numbers back.

Sometimes, but not all the time, my QV Load statement pulls them with a decimal point or a period, but only for the single digit numbers. So "1" comes in as "1." and "2" comes in as "2." etc., while the two digit numbers come in without the period. It's like Qlik thinks the values have to be two characters long so it adds a period.

I've fixed it by using the Num() function in the preceding load, but I'm curious. Has anyone seen this before? What causes it?

[Brett_Bleess]

Bill, what Connector are you using for this use case, ours or Teradata's?  If the prior, I would recommend trying the Teradata version and see if that behaves differently.  I would suspect this may be something in the Connector, but hard to say for sure.  You could try using that same Connector and Connect String in say Excel to do a pull into there and see how it comes in that way, as if that is correct, then I would say the issue may be on our side, but you have done the correct thing using hte Num() function on it to take care of things.  Sorry I do not have anything better for you.

Regards,
Brett

[billbois]

We're using the Teradata ODBC driver.  I tried it in Excel and didn't see the stray decimal point, but it's sporadic in Qlik so that's not an airtight test. Thanks for the suggestion!

[Brett_Bleess · Accepted solution]

I would probably recommend you open a support case if you can replicate it somewhat regularly, just cannot recall if we have access to a Teradata source or not to test things, should be able to track one down.  I would venture it most likely has to do with how we are interpreting things, which might be something deemed intentional.  If you are using Num() to control things and that is working, that is the best explanation I have as to why without that it may hiccup sometimes, but I think there should likely be something with the backend source at that point that is different someone on the values it has trouble deciphering correctly...  Sorry I do not have something better for you.

Regards,
Brett