Oracle-L: Why Use Anydata?

From: MacGregor, Ian A. <ian_at_SLAC.Stanford.EDU>
Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2002 13:48:31 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.004E15B3.20021004134831@fatcity.com>

I remember when anydata was first discussed a few months ago. I questioned how it could be part of proper database design; from what domain would the anydata column draw its values? As I recall everyone advised against its use, "It is a bad idea in Access and so it is in Oracle." was the gist of the comments. One wag proposed having two fields in the database, a sequence based primary key and the anydata field. Apparently that person was too shy to rely on rowid's :)

Why did you decide to use anydata? How does it benefit to your application? It strikes me as a bad idea, but I have not researched it at length.

Ian MacGregor
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
ian_at_SLAC.Stanford.edu

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 10:24 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Stephane,

if there is a new function, then it is hidden so deeply in the docs that even I can't find it. And I'm pretty good and coming up with "creative" search patterns.

ANYDATA is an object, a way of storing different types of data in a single column. You store the data type metadata with the column.

More information on this... when the other DBA ran the PL/SQL routine in a different account which had "resource" instead of just "connect" privileges, it ran....

interesting!

Rachel

Stephane Faroult <sfaroult_at_oriolecorp.com> wrote:
> Rachel,
>
> First time I hear about the ANYDATA type but I like to share my
> ignorance and I guess it must be something akin to a C 'void *' - ie
> a pointer to 'something'. To bind properly, Oracle needs two things :
> a) a pointer to the start of the memory area
> b) something to tell how big this memory area is. Either it's a 'well
> known' type, or you must use an end marker (typically, a '0' with
> character strings), or you must explicitly give a size.
>
> IMHO Oracle blows up because b) is missing. If you can insert, there
> must be some way of telling it how large the variable is. I can't see
> why it would be specific to an update (except if the PL/SQL engine is
> buggy, which obviously it is, but even more so than appears to the
> eye). Are you sure that there is not some obscure new function ... ?
>
> HTH
>
>

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Received on Fri Oct 04 2002 - 16:48:31 CDT