In my daily work I do a fair amount of coding for student information type applications.  This almost always involves using a student identifier (most commonly the student id) within queries.  We have multiple systems on campus that house student information, so this usually becomes a linking by id exercise.  I have always used the practice of coding and housing the 9 digit identifier as an Integer datatype, but for some reason we have one system on campus that houses this 9 digit id as a String.  It works fine within their system (obviously) but when it comes to linking in with others, its a mismatch.  Almost all the stuff I have done lives in a MySQL db, but the String type lives in Oracle.  Most of the time this becomes an issue when linking with Crystal (I’m on version 9).

One thing I can do in Crystal is create a command for my MySQL data which includes a type conversion within the SQL statement.  It looks something like

SELECT firstname, lastname, cast(studentid as integer) FROM tablename WHERE lastname = ‘Smith’;

That way, when I link the table with the Oracle table, the datatypes will match.