We have legacy table where one of the columns part of composite key was manually filled with values:
code
------
'001'
'002'
'099'
etc.
Now, we have feature request in which we must know MAX(code) in order to give user next possible value, in example case form above next value is '100'.
We tried to experiment with this but we still can't find any reasonable explanation how DB2 engine calculates that
MAX('001', '099', '576') is '576'
MAX('099', '99', 'www') is '99' and so on.
Any help or suggestion would be much appreciated!
You already have the answer to getting the maximum numeric value, but to answer the other part with regard to 'www','099','99'.
The AS/400 uses EBCDIC to store values, this is different to ASCII in several ways, the most important for your purposes is that Alpha characters come before numbers, which is the opposite of Ascii.
So on your Max() your 3 strings will be sorted and the highest EBCDIC value used so
As you can see your '99' string is really '99 ' so it is higher that the one with the leading zero.