Adding a boolean coulmn into existing table of oracle database - oracle

I am using oracle database and I have a table named MyTitle and into this existing table I have to add a column of type boolean so the name of the column is IsChecked and the default value should be false of that column, I have tried the below way please advise is it correct or not
alter Table MyTitle add IsChecked Number(1) default 0 not null ;

It looks reasonable. Do you have a problem with it? Different people/ systems have different conventions for pseudo-boolean columns. Some use a number with 0 and 1. Some use a char(1) with a 'Y' and 'N'. Be consistent with whatever convention exists in your system.
I'd normally include a check constraint that limits the values in the column to the values you want, i.e.
check( isChecked in (0,1) )
If you're building a data warehouse, though, there are schools of thought that including check constraints like this is unnecessary overhead since there is (or should be) only a very small number of paths (ideally one) to load the data via the ETL process so you merely need to ensure that the ETL process isn't inserting invalid values.

Related

Best way to identify a handful of records expected to have a flag set to TRUE

I have a table that I expect to get 7 million records a month on a pretty wide table. A small portion of these records are expected to be flagged as "problem" records.
What is the best way to implement the table to locate these records in an efficient way?
I'm new to Oracle, but is a materialized view an valid option? Are there such things in Oracle such as indexed views or is this potentially really the same thing?
Most of the reporting is by month, so partitioning by month seems like an option, but a "problem" record may be lingering for several months theorectically. Otherwise, the reporting shuold be mostly for the current month. Would you expect that querying across all month partitions to locate any problem record would cause significant performance issues compared to usinga single table?
Your general thoughts of where to start would be appreciated. I realize I need to read up and I'll do that but I wanted to get the community thought first to make sure I read the right stuff.
One more thought: The primary key is a GUID varchar2(36). In order of magnitude, how much of a performance hit would you expect this to be relative to using a NUMBER data type PK? This worries me but it is out of my control.
It depends what you mean by "flagged", but it sounds to me like you would benefit from a simple index, function based index, or an indexed virtual column.
In all cases you should be careful to ensure that all the index columns are NULL for rows that do not need to be flagged. This way your index will contain only the rows that are flagged (Oracle does not - by default - index rows in B-Tree indexes where all index column values are NULL).
Your primary key being a VARCHAR2 GUID should make no difference, at least with regards to the specific flagging of rows in this question, indexes will point to rows via Oracle internal ROWIDs.
Indexes support partitioning, so if your data is already partitioned, your index could be set to match.
Simple column index method
If you can dictate how the flagging works, or the column already exists, then I would simply add an index to it like so:
CREATE INDEX my_table_problems_idx ON my_table (problem_flag)
/
Function-based index method
If the data model is fixed / there is no flag column, then you can create a function-based index assuming that you have all the information you need in the target table. For example:
CREATE INDEX my_table_problems_fnidx ON my_table (
CASE
WHEN amount > 100 THEN 'Y'
ELSE NULL
END
)
/
Now if you use the same logic in your SELECT statement, you should find that it uses the index to efficiently match rows.
SELECT *
FROM my_table
WHERE CASE
WHEN amount > 100 THEN 'Y'
ELSE NULL
END IS NOT NULL
/
This is a bit clunky though, and it requires you to use the same logic in queries as the index definition. Not great. You could use a view to mask this, but you're still duplicating logic in at least two places.
Indexed virtual column
In my opinion, this is the best way to do it if you are computing the value dynamically (available from 11g onwards):
ALTER TABLE my_table
ADD virtual_problem_flag VARCHAR2(1) AS (
CASE
WHEN amount > 100 THEN 'Y'
ELSE NULL
END
)
/
CREATE INDEX my_table_problems_idx ON my_table (virtual_problem_flag)
/
Now you can just query the virtual column as if it were a real column, i.e.
SELECT *
FROM my_table
WHERE virtual_problem_flag = 'Y'
/
This will use the index and puts the function-based logic into a single place.
Create a new table with just the pks of the problem rows.

Adding column with default value

I have a table A (3 columns) in production which is around 10 million records. I wanted to add one more column to that table and also I want to make default value to 1. Is it going to impact production DB performance If add a column with default value 1 or something else. What would be best approach to this to avoid any kind of performance impact on DB? your thoughts are much appreciated!!
In Oracle 11g the process of adding a new column with a default value has been considerably optimized. If a newly added column is specified as NOT NULL, default value for that column is maintained in the data dictionary and it's no longer required for a default value of a column to be stored for all records in a table, so it's no longer required to update each record with a default value. Such an optimization considerably reduces amount of time the table is exclusively locked during the operation.
alter table <tab_name> add(<col_name> <data_type> default <def_val> not null)
Moreover, column with a default value added that way will not consume space, until you deliberately start to update that column or insert a record with a non default value for that column. So the operation of adding a new column with a default value and not null constraint specified completes pretty quick.
i think that it is better that you create a table as backup table with this syntax:
create table BackUpTable as SELECT * FROM YourTable;
alter table BackUpTable add (newColumn number(5,0)default 1);

Can a check constraint relate to another table? Oracle

I have searched for solution to my problem and this question describes it perfectly.
Let´s say I have one table called ProjectTimeSpan (which I haven´t, just as example!) containing the columns StartDate and EndDate.
And that I have another table called SubProjectTimeSpan, also containing columns called StartDate and EndDate, where I would like to set a Check constraint that makes it impossible to set StartDate and EndDate to values "outside" the ProjectTimeSpan.StartDate to ProjectTimeSpan.EndDate
Kind of a Check constraint that knows about another tables values...
Is this possible?
But I have a hard time to implement the solution to oracle. I've got even more puzzled when other articles stated that check constraint can not relate to other tables.
No it can't.
A FOREIGN KEY constraint can (and must) relate to another table, but it can only perform equiality checks.
I.e. you can test that a column (or a set of columns) are equal to those in the other table but not more complex conditions (like inside a span or whatever).
You'll have to implement a trigger for that.

Oracle Table structure

I have a table in Oracle Database which has 60 columns. Following is the table structure.
ID NAME TIMESTAMP PROERTY1 ...... PROPERTY60
This table will have many rows. the size of the table will be in GBs. But the problem with the table structure is that in future if I have to add a new property, I have to change the schema. To avoid that I want to change the table structure to following.
ID NAME TIMESTAMP PROPERTYNAME PROPERTYVALUE
A sample row will be.
1 xyz 40560 PROPERTY1 34500
In this way I will be able to solve the issue but the size of the table will grow bigger. Will it have any impact on performance in terms on fetching data. I am new to Oracle. I need your suggestion on this.
if I have to add a new property, I have to change the schema
Is that actually a problem? Adding a column has gotten cheaper and more convenient in newer versions of Oracle.
But if you still need to make your system dynamic, in a sense that you don't have to execute DDL for new properties, the following simple EAV implementation would probably be a good start:
CREATE TABLE FOO (
FOO_ID INT PRIMARY KEY
-- Other fields...
);
CREATE TABLE FOO_PROPERTY (
FOO_ID INT REFERENCES FOO (FOO_ID),
NAME VARCHAR(50),
VALUE VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT FOO_PROPERTY_PK PRIMARY KEY (FOO_ID, NAME)
) ORGANIZATION INDEX;
Note ORGANIZATION INDEX: the whole table is just one big B-Tree, there is no table heap at all. Properties that belong to the same FOO_ID are stored physically close together, so retrieving all properties of the known FOO_ID will be cheap (but not as cheap as when all the properties were in the same row).
You might also want to consider whether it would be appropriate to:
Add more indexes in FOO_PROPERTY (e.g. for searching on property name or value). Just beware of the extra cost of secondary indexes in index-organized tables.
Switch the order of columns in the FOO_PROPERTY PK - if you predominantly search on property names and rarely retrieve all the properties of the given FOO_ID. This would also make the index compression feasible, since the leading edge of the index is now relatively wide string (as opposed to narrow integer).
Use a different type for VALUE (e.g. RAW, or even in-line BLOB/CLOB, which can have performance implications, but might also provide additional flexibility). Alternatively, you might even have a separate table for each possible value type, instead of stuffing everything in a string.
Separate property "declaration" to its own table. This table would have two keys: beside string NAME it would also have integer PROPERTY_ID which can then be used as a FK in FOO_PROPERTY instead of the NAME (saving some storage, at the price of more JOIN-ing).

Unique constraint violation during insert: why? (Oracle)

I'm trying to create a new row in a table. There are two constraints on the table -- one is on the key field (DB_ID), the other constrains a value to be one of several the the field ENV. When I do an insert, I do not include the key field as one of the fields I'm trying to insert, yet I'm getting this error:
unique constraint (N390.PK_DB_ID) violated
Here's the SQL that causes the error:
insert into cmdb_db
(narrative_name, db_name, db_type, schema, node, env, server_id, state, path)
values
('Test Database', 'DB', 'TYPE', 'SCH', '', 'SB01', 381, 'TEST', '')
The only thing I've been able to turn up is the possibility that Oracle might be trying to assign an already in-use DB_ID if rows were inserted manually. The data in this database was somehow restored/moved from a production database, but I don't have the details as to how that was done.
Any thoughts?
Presumably, since you're not providing a value for the DB_ID column, that value is being populated by a row-level before insert trigger defined on the table. That trigger, presumably, is selecting the value from a sequence.
Since the data was moved (presumably recently) from the production database, my wager would be that when the data was copied, the sequence was not modified as well. I would guess that the sequence is generating values that are much lower than the largest DB_ID that is currently in the table leading to the error.
You could confirm this suspicion by looking at the trigger to determine which sequence is being used and doing a
SELECT <<sequence name>>.nextval
FROM dual
and comparing that to
SELECT MAX(db_id)
FROM cmdb_db
If, as I suspect, the sequence is generating values that already exist in the database, you could increment the sequence until it was generating unused values or you could alter it to set the INCREMENT to something very large, get the nextval once, and set the INCREMENT back to 1.
Your error looks like you are duplicating an already existing Primary Key in your DB. You should modify your sql code to implement its own primary key by using something like the IDENTITY keyword.
CREATE TABLE [DB] (
[DBId] bigint NOT NULL IDENTITY,
...
CONSTRAINT [DB_PK] PRIMARY KEY ([DB] ASC),
);
It looks like you are not providing a value for the primary key field DB_ID. If that is a primary key, you must provide a unique value for that column. The only way not to provide it would be to create a database trigger that, on insert, would provide a value, most likely derived from a sequence.
If this is a restoration from another database and there is a sequence on this new instance, it might be trying to reuse a value. If the old data had unique keys from 1 - 1000 and your current sequence is at 500, it would be generating values that already exist. If a sequence does exist for this table and it is trying to use it, you would need to reconcile the values in your table with the current value of the sequence.
You can use SEQUENCE_NAME.CURRVAL to see the current value of the sequence (if it exists of course)

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