Re: storing email messages in oracle ?

Atif Ahmad Khan wrote:
>
> I am going to start work on an application that would store incoming
> and outgoing email messages in Oracle. I am not sure what kind of a

I hope this is a school and/or learning project. There are too many good email programs already out there to build your own. That said, I would personally store the email in a text file and reference it from an oracle table if possible. Otherwise, you'll have limits as to how long a mail message can be, even if you use a LONG column (the db could store up to 2 gig, plenty for a mail message) the program you use to access it will have a limit much smaller than that.

> P.S. Does anybody know how to drop a column from a table in Oracle ?
> I looked up Alter table command but it apparently doesn't do it.
 Unfortunately you can't because the data is stored and accessed  sequentially column by column. So if the table has 3 columns, all  varchar2, the data is stored as

<L1><D1><L2><D2><L3><D3>

where L1 is the length of D1 and D1 is the data for column 1, and so on. You couldn't just drop column 2 without rearranging the data. So you have to copy the remaining columns to another table that was created without the column you wish to drop. Note that export/import won't work since it will try to insert the old column, even if you create the new table ahead of time without the old column.

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Allen Kirby			AT&T ITS Production Services
akirby_at_att.com			Alpharetta, GA.