Please, note that seems that the incorrect field is:

'penalty' => '0.3333333',

See the workaround, I cannot test it because I haven't access to the server where the problem is

I was suggested in the Developers chat to do the following:

Set this enviroment option in Oracle:

NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS='.,'

before the webserver starts

Any news about whether that suggested fix solves the problem?

Our client switch to MySQL and since Moodle is faster they are not going back to Oracle

Sorry for not providing any useful feedback

From HQ:

12:59:27] <Cindereloy> please, allow me to pass here. I did not delete that line from the driver nor agreed with that measure. So I'm not going to decide about that. The guy that did that (Petr) seemed to have some good reasons that I don't know.

To explain Eloy's last comment:

(11:55:29 AM) jleyva@jabber.org: the problem is that ALTER SESSION SET NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS='.,' was present in configure_dbconnection (Moodle 1.9) but now has been removed

...

(11:59:27 AM) Cindereloy: please, allow me to pass here. I did not delete that line from the driver nor agreed with that measure. So I'm not going to decide about that. The guy that did that (Petr) seemed to have some good reasons that I don't know.

Petr, can you help us here?

• Do I need to add a cast to float to my code, or
• Should the oracle DB class handle this, or
• Should I just close this won'tfix and rely on Oracle admins reading the docs and setting NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS manually?

Thanks.

I've added a note also in the WIKI page for the Oracle installation (PHP)

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Installing_Oracle_for_PHP#Configure_Apache

See also this related ticket: http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-11629

Hi,

I do not have Oracle test install and necessary knowledge, sorry. I never maintained the oracle driver, feel free to do any changes inside it that do not affect other drivers.

We should imo:

• convert all user input (strings with , or . based on current lang) to PHP floats
• us PHP floats when inserting/updating database

This is not user input. This is a value from a select element in a form.

Anything coming from POST is a user input here - labels have to be localised for the user, the values shoudl be casted to proper PHP type.

I guess the DML unittests should be improved first and then the driver + coding style and code should be updated. My vote goes to explicit casting of string decimals to PHP floats before storage to database. Fetching from database is yet another problem, I guess it is broken in Oracle driver too when some locale settings used there.

I think that HQ (or anybody else) should either provide test servers for each DB supported (all possible versions and configurations) or we have to stop pretending we are supporting Oracle and MSSQL...

OK, reassigning to HQ. This is clearly a database/policy issue.

I had a similar Problem (Moodle 2.2.1, Oracle 11) and added the following lines of code in oci_native_moodle_database.php after line 214:
...
$sql1 = "ALTER SESSION SET NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS='.,'";
$this->query_start($sql1, null, SQL_QUERY_UPDATE);
$stmt1 = $this->parse_query($sql1);
$result = oci_execute($stmt1, $this->commit_status);
$this->query_end($result, $stmt1);
oci_free_statement($stmt1);
...
After I restarted my server it worked.
I think the problem was, that our database is configured for German language and so the NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS is ',.' by default.

This looks like it has been hanging around for a bit.