Learning is not a spectator sport
Connor McDonald on SQL and the Oracle Database
Tag: ddl
Take care with automatic indexes
This one came in via an AskTOM question. You need to be careful when disabling constraints that are underpinned by an index, especially when it comes to the storage for that index. Let’s take a look at a simple example. I’ll explicitly nominate the…
Grab all the DDL
I posted a video a couple of days ago showing a trigger mechanism to customize the capture of DDL that is issued on your database. The aim here is to be more generous with letting developers execute DDL on their Development databases, whilst still…
DDL for constraints – subtle things
The DBMS_METADATA package is very cool. I remember the days of either hand-crafting DDL statements based on queries to the data dictionary, or many a DBA will be familiar with running “imp show=y” or “imp indexfile=…” in order to then laboriously extract the DDL…
Parsing freeform data in flat files
SQL loader is a very cool utility that has existed for a long time within Oracle to load flat files into the database. However sometimes people find the control file syntax quite cryptic, and when it comes to passing very complicated structures, this can…
LOBs and tiny typos
This one caught me out – I was racing around looking for bugs, or parameter files, or hidden settings that stopped SECUREFILE lobs from being created. Here was my incredibly simple test case – create a securefile LOB, and then make sure it’s a…
Please keep your foreign keys
I came across an interesting blog post the other day about whether databases should be (declaratively) enforcing the foreign key relationships between tables. The blog post discussed the issue of foreign keys being temporarily disabled to perform data loading, and then encountering the problem…
Better to be safe than sorry…
I’ve always been worried about taking a script that is fine to run in my non-production environments (in particular a DROP script) and accidentally running it in a Production environment, shortly followed by the typing up of a fresh resume to look for a…
