Re: Trigger referencing LONG in 8i

Many thanks to Howard Latham, Sunil Bhola, Karsten Weikop and Stephen Booth for much appreciated help, but...

The application is a small system for billing planes for airport cervices received on the ground. We are writing a finantials package for the airport and customer wants us to integrate with the system and produce an invoice for every row inserted in a specific table.         

I haven't seen the application itself but it is clearly written in COBOL and ported form big iron. Table names are no longer than 6 characters and all of the columns are like COL01, COL02, COL03. Each colum in turn contains a couple of fixed-size COBOL recors. If a coulumn is less than 256 bytes it was created as CHAR(123 bytes), if it is larger, it became LONG :( Apparently application was first implemented with plain file datasets and then upon request "ported" to Oracle by mapping exact structure of datafiles into Oracle tables. And of course there are no primary keys and we can not add ones.

The last time airport contacted the firm that wrote original program was in 1999 to fix year 2000 problem. Company requested 6 million dollars for that. Our customer refused and never contacted the company thereafter. It would be cheaper to put a clerk with two terminals to read data from old system and enter invoices into our ERP system.

The database server is 8i on Alpha, our system is 10g on Power4 AIX. We can not add a new column to be an artificial primary. Though we can create triggers but 8i does not allow to cerate ones on tables with LONG column type. Taking exports several time a day is not acceptable because the application deletes the rows after some time, we are not sure when. We need to catch only INSERTs, no UPDATE or DELETEs.

The only thing that comes to my mind is to try to parse archivelog files produced by 8i and get data inserted into a specified table. Can someone point me to a documentation on 8i arcivelog format on Alpha?

Oracle is a very good database but some if it's limitations are unreasonable and just plainly stupid.

Best regards,
Nicolai Tufar

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