hi all, have a sql question. i have a table which has a column varchar2(10) which holds employee numbers e.g 'X1234'. I need to update these and change them to lower case 'x' whereever they are uppercase 'X' e.g if number in column is 'X1234' i need to update it to be 'x1234'. i dont want to update one at a time so is there an easy way to update them all in a sql update statement ?? thanks in advance.

You don't want to update one at a time? It's impossiable,for the database will change it one by one wahtever the sql is.

what i meant was i dont want to hard code each 'x number ' line by line. i dont really care how the db does it i just want the sql for it.

Try using a the lower case function and and a substring function if you have to restrict the scope.

ok heres what i got so far : update employee set number = (select lower(number) from employee where number like 'X%') and this doesnt work since the subselect returns multiple rows. so can someone suggest another way of doing this ??