In Informix, I can do a select from the systables table, and can investigate its version column to see what numeric version a given table has. This column is incremented with every DDL statement that affects the given table. This means I have the ability to see whether a table's structure has changed since the last time I connected.
Is there a similar way to do this in Oracle?
Not really. The Oracle DBA/ALL/USER_OBJECTS view has a LAST_DDL_TIME column, but it is affected by operations other than structure changes.
You can do that (and more) with a DDL trigger that keeps track of changes to tables. There's an interesting article with example here.
If you really want to do so, you'd have to use Oracle's auditing functions to audit the changes. It could be as simple as:
AUDIT ALTER TABLE WHENEVER SUCCESSFUL on [schema I care about];
That would at least capture the successfuly changes, ignoring drops and creates. Unfortunately, unwinding the stack of the table's historical strucuture by mining the audit trail is left as an exercise to the reader in Oracle, or to licensing the Change Management Pack.
You could also roll your own auditing by writing system-event triggers which are invoked on DDL statements. You'd end up having to write your own SQL parser if you really wantedto see what was changing.
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I want to know ddl(Eg. adding a column in table) changes for specific user after a specific date in oracle? One strategy is by querying 'user_objects' table. Is there any other way to do this?
Can i also find out what ddl(Eg. added column name in table) changes has been done after specific date?
Version - Oracle Database 12c Standard Edition Release 12.1.0.2.0 - 64bit Production
Audit DDL statements on or before the specified date. Capture DDL statements with a DDL trigger. Use a source control and build management system to track the history of changes. Or, if you happen to have every archived log since the specified date, laboriously go through them looking for DDL statements (this will not be a fun exercise if the specified date isn't really recent).
Otherwise, no. You can certainly look at the last_ddl_time in user_objects. But there are DDL statements that aren't changes (GRANT is a DDL statement for example, PL/SQL objects get recompiled automatically when there is DDL on a dependent object, etc) that will update the last_ddl_time without being what most people would consider a change. Unless you enable auditing, the data dictionary isn't going to be able to tell you what DDL caused the last_ddl_time to change so you won't know whether it was something that you consider a change, whether there were multiple changes, or what those changes are. If you happen to be lucky enough that your new column has an index, you could potentially infer when it was added by looking at the creation date of the associated index.
I want to keep logs of all tables into 1 single log table. Suppose if any DML operation is going on any table inside DB. Than that should be logged in 1 single tables.
But there should be a dynamic trigger which will not hard coded the column names for every table.
Is there any solution for this.
Regards,
Somdutt Harihar
"Is there any solution for this"
No. This is not how databases work. Strongly enforced data structures is what they do, and that applies to audit tables just as much as transaction tables.
The reason is quite clear: the time you save not writing audit code specific to each transactional table is the time you will spend writing a query to retrieve the audit records. The difference is, when you're trying to get the audit records out you will have your boss standing over your shoulder demanding to know when you can tell them what happened to the payroll records last month. Or asking how long it will take you to produce that report for the regulators, are you trying to make the company look like a bunch of clowns? You get the picture. This is not where you want to be.
Also, the performance of a single table to store all the changes to all the tables in the database? That is going to be so slow, you have no idea.
The point is, we can generate the auditing code. It is easy to write some SQL which interrogates the data dictionary and produces DDL for the target tables and triggers to populate those tables.
In fact it gets even easier in 11.2.0.4 and later because we can use FLASHBACK DATA ARCHIVE (formerly Oracle Total Recall) to build and maintain such journalling functionality automatically, and query it automatically with the as of syntax. Find out more.
Okay, so technically there is a solution. You could have a trigger on each table which executes some dynamic PL/SQL to interrogate the data dictionary and assembles a piece of JSON which you stuff into your single table. The single table could be partitioned by day range and sub-partitioned by table name (assuming you have licensed the Partitioning option) to mitigate the performance of querying it.
But that is extremely complex. Running dynamic PL/SQL for every DML statement will have a bad effect on performance, which the users will notice. And this still doesn't solve the fundamental problem of retrieving the audit trail when you need it.
To audit DML actions on any table just enable such audit by using following code:
audit insert table, update table, delete table;
All actions with tables will then be logged to sys.dba_audit_object table.
Audit will only log timestamp, user, host and other params, not exact copies of new or old rows.
I have around 500 tables in DB. If there is any DML operations performed on that table then trigger should be fired to capture those dml activities and should load it into an audit table. I dont want to write 500 individual triggers. Any simple method to achieve this?
To switch all high level auditing of DML statements for all tables:
AUDIT INSERT TABLE, UPDATE TABLE, DELETE TABLE;
What objects we can manage depends on what privileges we have. Find out more.
AUDIT will write basic information to the audit trail. The destination depends on the value of the AUDIT_TRAIL parameter. If the parameter is set to db the output is written to a database table: we can see our trail in USER_AUDIT_TRAIL or (if we have the privilege) everything in DBA_AUDIT_TRAIL.
The audit trail is high level, which means it records that user FOX updated the EMP table but doesn't tell us which records or what the actual changes were. We can implement granular auditing by creating Fine-Grained Audit policies. This requires a lot more work on our part so we may decide not to enable it for all our tables. Find out more.
Triggers are used on tables only, not the entire database. Ignoring the complexity of maintaining disparate data types, data use, context of various tables and their use, what you are looking for would be extremely complex, something no RDBMS has addressed at the database level.
There is some information on triggers at this link:
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/A57673_01/DOC/server/doc/SCN73/ch15.htm
You could place a trigger on each table that calls the same procedure ... but then all that complexity comes into play.
Background: My team has an etl job that updates an aggregate table. Each row contains data for a particular date, but this row can and will get updated after the row date (which means any row can contain data from multiple jobs). This ETL job missed some data for one day last week and now I need to backfill it.
Problem: I have the missing data, and what I was planning on doing was dumping that data into a temporary table and then merging it with the agg table. That way I can deal with whether the ETL job already contains a row for that data (update) or whether a new row needs to be added (insert), but I don't have sufficient permissions to create a temp table, and I'd prefer not to involve the DBA.
Question: Can I do an insert/update sort of behavior without creating a temporary table (this is Oracle SQL by the way).
Edit: The data is coming from a tsv file.
Why do you want to avoid involving the DBA? The DBA should have full knowledge of what's going on in the database, as they are ultimately responsible for the condition of the data within it. So you shouldn't be playing sneaky commando with them.
As you have a file of missing data, the easiest way to present it to the database is with an external table. This requires the creation of the table and probably a directory object as well. You will need the DBA's help with this task.
The only way to avoid creating database objects is to convert your TSV file into a series of DML statements. An IDE which supports regex and/or records macros will prove invaluable here. I like TextPad; other editors are available.
The DML statement for doing upserts in Oracle is the MERGE statement. The one thing you need to watch for is recency. Your missing data comes from last week. If a row exists it may have have been added or amended in the intervening period. You must write your MERGE statement so it does not overwrite more recent data with the older stuff. Hopefully your table has useful metadata columns such as DATE_CREATED and LAST_UPDATED.
I'm using (have to) a badly designed Oracle(10) DB, for which I don't have admin rights (although I can create tables, triggers, etc in my scheme).
Now I had run into a problem: this DB connected with several users/programs. I must find out who updates a certain row, when, and if possible: with what kind of statement. Is it possible?
Thanks in advance!
It would be easier to do this if you had admin rights to enable auditing. Without the power of auditing you are left with the use of triggers to handle the logging of inserts/updates/delete. In your case since you are interested in only update, you can put a trigger on the table to fire after the update which logs to another table what was changed, by whom, from where and to what and on what day.
I would create a journal table for the table you are working with. It will show you the operation type and the oracle user...as well as a bunch of other data if you need it.