Oracle Dump() statement

Discovered an interesting Oracle statement today. The statement is dump. The syntax is Dump(value)

This returns the raw value of a row's column.

Here are the possible values:

• 8 returns result in octal notation.

• 10 returns result in decimal notation.

• 16 returns result in hexadecimal notation.

• 17 returns result as single characters.

If you add 1000 to it, it returns the characterset.

The following website gives some good examples:

dump('Tech') would return 'Typ=96 Len=4: 84,101,99,104'
dump('Tech', 10) would return 'Typ=96 Len=4: 84,101,99,104'
dump('Tech', 16) would return 'Typ=96 Len=4: 54,65,63,68'
dump('Tech', 1016) would return 'Typ=96 Len=4 CharacterSet=US7ASCII: 54,65,63,68'
dump('Tech', 1017) would return 'Typ=96 Len=4 CharacterSet=US7ASCII: T,e,c,h'