Posted by I saw this on an AskTom question today answered by my colleague Chris. Check out this simple example
SQL> create table T (
2 x int default 1,
3 y int default 1
4 ,z int);
Table created.
It looks like I’ve assigned a default of “1” to both X and Y. But lets now dump out the default definition from the dictionary.
SQL>
SQL> set serverout on
SQL> declare
2 longcol varchar2(200);
3 begin
4 for i in (
5 select column_name, data_default
6 from user_tab_cols
7 where table_name = 'T'
8 )
9 loop
10 longcol := i.data_Default;
11 dbms_output.put_line(i.column_name||'-'||length(longcol));
12 end loop;
13 end;
14 /
X-1
Y-3
Z-
Notice the length of the default for Y. If we output those 3 characters (not shown here) we get “1” (the default), then a line feed, then a space.
So where you put the commas makes a difference ! Of course, ultimately (because its a numeric) the assigned value will not change.
Learning is not a spectator sport 
Hello Connor,
Technically that is correct. But since this is just an expression the additional whitespace stored will never make a difference in real live.
So it is just “ugly” that more whitespaces are stored in the dictionary than necessary. That’s it.
Cheers
Philipp
While the metadata about the length of the default in USER_TAB_COLS may be off, the data itself is represented correctly:
insert into t (x, y, z) values (9, 9, 9);
insert into t (z) values (0);
insert into t (x, y, z) values (11, 12, 13);
insert into t (x, y, z) values (101, 102, 103);
commit;
SQL> select x, length(x), y, length(y), z, length(z) from t;
X LENGTH(X) Y LENGTH(Y) Z LENGTH(Z)
---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------
9 1 9 1 9 1
1 1 1 1 0 1
11 2 12 2 13 2
101 3 102 3 103 3