ZONED

ZONED data is in zoned decimal format: a string of decimal digits, one per byte, with the sign included in the last byte. (In COBOL, this is a SIGN TRAILING field.) The length of this field equals the precision (number of digits) that you specify.

The syntax for the ZONED data type is:

In this syntax, precision is the number of digits in the number, and scale (if given) is the number of digits to the right of the (implied) decimal point. The following example specifies an 8-digit integer starting at position 32:

sal  POSITION(32)  ZONED(8), 
 

The Oracle database uses the VAX/VMS zoned decimal format when the zoned data is generated on an ASCII-based platform. It is also possible to load zoned decimal data that is generated on an EBCDIC-based platform. In this case, Oracle uses the IBM format as specified in the ESA/390 Principles of Operations, version 8.1 manual. The format that is used depends on the character set encoding of the input data file. See "CHARACTERSET Parameter" for more information.