New to SQL. Pardon me if this question is a basic one. Is there a way for me to do this below
SELECT COLUMN1 as CUSTOM_NAME, <wildcard for remaining columns as is> from TABLE;
I only want COLUMN1 appear once in the final result
There is no way to make that kind of dynamic SELECT list with regular SQL*.
This is a good thing. Programming gets more difficult the more dynamic it is. Even the simple * syntax, while useful in many contexts, causes problems in production code. The Oracle SQL grammar is already more complicated than most traditional programming languages, adding a little meta language to describe what the queries return could be a nightmare.
*Well, you could create something using Oracle data cartridge, or DBMS_XMLGEN, or a trick with the PIVOT clause. But each of those solutions would be incredibly complicated and certainly not as simple as just typing the columns.
This is about as close as you will get.
It is very handy for putting the important columns up front,
while being able to scroll to the others if needed. COLUMN1 will end up being there twice.
SELECT COLUMN1 as CUSTOM_NAME,
aliasName.*
FROM TABLE aliasName;
In case you have many columns it might be worth to generate a full column list automatically instead of relying on the * selector.
So a two step approach would be to generate the column list with custom first N columns and unspecified order of the other columns, then use this generated list in your actual select statement.
-- select comma separated column names from table with the first columns being in specified order
select
LISTAGG(column_name, ', ') WITHIN GROUP (
ORDER BY decode(column_name,
'FIRST_COLUMN_NAME', 1,
'SECOND_COLUMN_NAME', 2) asc) "Columns"
from user_tab_columns
where table_name = 'TABLE_NAME';
Replace TABLE_NAME, FIRST_COLUMN_NAME and SECOND_COLUMN_NAME by your actual names, adjust the list of explicit columns as needed.
Then execute the query and use the result, which should look like
FIRST_COLUMN_NAME, SECOND_COLUMN_NAME, OTHER_COLUMN_NAMES
Ofcourse this is overhead for 5-ish columns, but if you ever run into a company database with 3 digit number of columns, this can be interesting.
Related
Is it possible to get a list of used columns in a particular procedure using PL/SQL? I have to check over 500 procedures in my Oracle DB and print out all the columns used in them.
Surprisingly, Oracle does make the calculated table dependencies in PL/SQL available for viewing:
select * from user_dependencies -- can also use all_ or dba_dependencies
where type = 'PROCEDURE' and REFERENCED_TYPE = 'TABLE';
But if you really need column-level dependencies, I think it'll be much more difficult. Here's a very simple answer that'll illustrate some of the problems with the question.
select name, type, line, text, table_name, column_name
from user_source
join user_tab_cols
on text like '%'|| column_name || '%';
So you can search through all your procedures for any strings that match an existing column name. I can think of dozens of problems with this approach; the commenters above mentioned some of them, like how deep into the call stack you want to look. Or depending on how your columns are named, ambiguous names (SID, MODIFIED_DATE, etc) will produce duplicate entries. And there's no way to distinguish between actual references to column names and local variables which happen to have the same spelling. Or comments. And views or synonyms can screw up your searching. It seems like a really tough question. I hope the tables from user_dependencies will be enough for your needs.
I am working with huge table which has 9 million records. I am trying to take backup of the table. As below.
First Query
Create table newtable1 as select * from hugetable ;
Second Query
Select * into newtable2 from hugetable ;
Here first query seems to be quite fast. I want to know the functional difference and Why it is fast compare to second query?, Which one is to be preferred?
Quote from the manual:
This command (create table as) is functionally similar to SELECT INTO, but it is preferred since it is less likely to be confused with other uses of the SELECT INTO syntax. Furthermore, CREATE TABLE AS offers a superset of the functionality offered by SELECT INTO.
So both do the same thing, but CREATE TABLE AS is part of the SQL standard (and thus works on other DBMS as well), whereas the SELECT INTO is non-standard. As the manuals says, you should prefer CREATE TABLE AS over the non-standard syntax.
Performance wise both are identical, the differences you see are probably related to caching or other activities on your system.
I need to work with a SQL result set in order to do some processing for each column (medians, standard deviations, several control statements included)
The SQL is dynamic so I don't know the number of columns, rows.
First I tried to use temporary tables, views, etc to store the results, however I did not manage to overcome the 30 character limit of Oracle columns when using the below sql:
create table (or view or global temporary table) as select * from (
SELECT
DMTTBF_MAT_MATURATO_BILL_POS.MAT_V_COD_ANNOMESE,
SUM(DMTTBF_MAT_MATURATO_BILL_POS.MAT_N_NUM_EVENTI_CHZ +DMTTBF_MAT_MATURATO_BILL_POS. MAT_N_NUM_EVENTI) <-- exceeds the 30 character limit
FROM DMTTBF_MAT_MATURATO_BILL_POS
WHERE DMTTBF_MAT_MATURATO_BILL_POS.MAT_V_COD_ANNOMESE >= '201301'
GROUP BY DMTTBF_MAT_MATURATO_BILL_POS.MAT_V_COD_ANNOMESE
)
Second choice was to use some PL/SQL types to store the entire table information, so I could call it like in other programming languages (e.g. a matrix result[i][j]) but I could not find anything similar.
Third variant, using files for reading and writing: i did not try it yet; i'm still expecting a more elegant pl/sql solution
It's possible that I have the wrong approach here so any advice is more than welcome.
UPDATE: Modifying the input SQL is not an option. The program has to accept any select statement.
Note that you can alias both tables and fields. Using a table alias keeps references to it from producing walls of text in the query. Using one for a field gives it a new name in the output.
SELECT A.LONG_FIELD_NAME_HERE AS SHORTNAME
FROM REALLY_LONG_TABLE_NAME_HERE A
The auto naming adds _1 and _2 etc to differentiate the same column name coming from different table references. This often puts a field already borderline over the limit. Giving the fields names yourself bypasses this.
You can put the alias also in dynamic SQL:
sqlstr := 'create table (or view or global temporary table) as select * from (
SELECT
DMTTBF_MAT_MATURATO_BILL_POS.MAT_V_COD_ANNOMESE,
SUM(DMTTBF_MAT_MATURATO_BILL_POS.MAT_N_NUM_EVENTI_CHZ + DMTTBF_MAT_MATURATO_BILL_POS.MAT_N_NUM_EVENTI) AS '||SUBSTR('SUM(DMTTBF_MAT_MATURATO_BILL_POS.MAT_N_NUM_EVENTI_CHZ +DMTTBF_MAT_MATURATO_BILL_POS.MAT_N_NUM_EVENTI)', 1, 30)
||' FROM DMTTBF_MAT_MATURATO_BILL_POS
WHERE DMTTBF_MAT_MATURATO_BILL_POS.MAT_V_COD_ANNOMESE >= ''201301''
GROUP BY DMTTBF_MAT_MATURATO_BILL_POS.MAT_V_COD_ANNOMESE
)'
I read somewhere that 99% of time you don't need to use a cursor.
But I can't think of any other way beside using a cursor in this following situation.
Select t.flag
From Dual t;
Let's say this return 4 rows of either 'Y' or 'N'. I want the procedure to trigger something if it finds 'Y'. I usually declare a cursor and loop until %NOTFOUND. Please tell me if there is a better way.
Also, if you have any idea, when is the best time to use a cursor?
EDIT: Instead of inserting the flags, what if I want to do "If 'Y' then trigger something"?
Your case definitely falls into the 99%.
You can easily do the conditional insert using insert into ... select.... It's just a matter or making a select that returns the result that you want to insert.
If you want to insert one record for each 'Y' then use a query with where flag = 'Y'. If you only want to insert a single record depending on whether there are at least one 'Y', then you can add distinct to the query.
A cursor is useful when you make something more complicated. I for example use a cursor when need to insert or update records in one table, and also for each record insert or update one or more records into several other tables.
Something like this:
INSERT INTO TBL_FLAG (col)
SELECT ID FROM Dual where flag = 'Y'
You will usually see a performance gain when using set based instead of procedural operations because most modern DBMS are setup to perform set based operations. You can read more here.
well the example doesnt quite make sense..
but you can always write an insert as select statement instead of what i think you are describing
Cursors are best to use when an column value form one table will be used repeatedly in multiple queries on different tables.
Suppose the values of id_test column are fetched from MY_TEST_TBL using a cursor CUR_TEST. Now this id_test column is a foreign key in MY_TEST_TBL. If we want to use id_test to insert or update any rows in table A_TBL,B_TBL and C_TBL, then in this case it's best to use cursors instead of using complex queries.
Hope this might help to understand the purpose of cursors
I am new to Oracle and working with a fairly large database. I would like to perform a query that will select the desired columns, order by a certain column and also limit the results. According to everything I have read, the below query should be working but it is returning "ORA-00918: column ambiguously defined":
SELECT * FROM(SELECT * FROM EAI.EAI_EVENT_LOG e,
EAI.EAI_EVENT_LOG_MESSAGE e1 WHERE e.SOURCE_URL LIKE '%.XML'
ORDER BY e.REQUEST_DATE_TIME DESC) WHERE ROWNUM <= 20
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated :D
The error message means your result set contains two columns with the same name. Each column in a query's projection needs to have a unique name. Presumably you have a column (or columns) with the same name in both EAI_EVENT_LOG and EAI_EVENT_LOG_MESSAGE.
You also want to join on that column. At the moment you are generating a cross join between the two tables. In other words, if you have a hundred records in EAI_EVENT_LOG and two hundred records EAI_EVENT_LOG_MESSAGE your result set will be twenty thousand records (without the rownum). This is probably your intention.
"By switching to innerjoin, will that eliminate the error with the
current code?"
No, you'll still need to handle having two columns with the same name. Basically this comes from using SELECT * on two multiple tables. SELECT * is bad practice. It's convenient but it is always better to specify the exact columns you want in the query's projection. That way you can include (say) e.TRANSACTION_ID and exclude e1.TRANSACTION_ID, and avoid the ORA-00918 exception.
Maybe you have some columns in both EAI_EVENT_LOG and EAI_EVENT_LOG_MESSAGE tables having identical names? Instead of SELECT * list all columns you want to select.
Other problem I see is that you are selecting from two tables but you're not joining them in the WHERE clause hence the result set will be the cross product of those two table.
You need to stop using SQL '89 implicit join syntax.
Not because it doesn't work, but because it is evil.
Right now you have a cross join which in 99,9% of the cases is not what you want.
Also every sub-select needs to have it's own alias.
SELECT * FROM
(SELECT e.*, e1.* FROM EAI.EAI_EVENT_LOG e
INNER JOIN EAI.EAI_EVENT_LOG_MESSAGE e1 on (......)
WHERE e.SOURCE_URL LIKE '%.XML'
ORDER BY e.REQUEST_DATE_TIME DESC) s WHERE ROWNUM <= 20
Please specify a join criterion on the dotted line.
Normally you do a join on a keyfield e.g. ON (e.id = e1.event_id)
It's bad idea to use select *, it's better to specify exactly which fields you want:
SELECT e.field1 as customer_id
,e.field2 as customer_name
.....