Oracle PL/SQL Programming, Third Edition

Name

GREATEST

Synopsis

GREATEST takes one or more strings as input, and returns the string that would come last (i.e., that is the greatest) if the inputs were to be sorted in ascending order. The ordering of the strings is based on character code in the database character set. GREATEST has the following specification:

FUNCTION GREATEST (string1 IN VARCHAR2, string2 IN VARCHAR2,...)
   RETURN VARCHAR2

Following is an example:

                     BEGIN
                        DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(GREATEST('Jonathan','Steven','Bill'));
                     END;

Steven

Also see the LEAST function, which is the opposite of GREATEST.