title: How to find out the number of digits of an oracle number
body: <p>I have a table in oracle that looks like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>name              |     type    | nullable  
  ------------------------------------------
  person_name       | varchar(20) | yes  
  weight_coeficient | number      | yes
  ...
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>How can I figure out <strong>how many digits a value of weight_coeficient</strong> has ? For example:</p>
  
  <p><code>3.0123456789</code> has 11 digits (<a href="http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28318/datatype.htm#CNCPT1832" rel="nofollow">precision</a> = 11) and 10 digits after the decimal (<a href="http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B28359_01/server.111/b28318/datatype.htm#CNCPT1832" rel="nofollow">scale</a> = 10)</p>
  
  <p>Is there any sql command/function that does that, something like <code>GetPrecision( select.. )</code> that returns 11 ?</p>
  
  <p>Note also that the definition of the table does not specify scale and precision. So as far as I know the maximum precision is applied for all the numbers. So I'm not interested in finding out the precision (= 48) of the definition, but the precision of a specific value in the table. Is that possible just using oracle commands ? </p>
  
  <p>Thank you in advance, <br>JP</p>