Re: Nested Tables in Oracle

"FC" <flavio_at_tin.it> wrote in message news:<HAxHb.15857$_P.694519_at_news4.tin.it>...
> If you have an arbitrarily long unordered sequence of values associated to
> each record, I find nested table very practical, especially if you ever need
> to copy the records from table to table, i.e. saving records in a
> history-like fashion. If the "values" are n-dimensional, like (x,y,z)
> coordinates for instance, nested tables are even more handy.

How is that more practical than using simple, related tables?

> Nested tables and varrays are a bad choice if you need to enforce relational
> constraints or you have to deal with a large number (>100) of "nested
> records" that would normally require indexes on certain columns. In that
> case you had better to design everything in terms of standard tables with
> their foreign keys, constraints, indexes and so on.

So may as well always do that?

> I've also experienced tricky situations with nested tables and data
> migration using oracle imports and exports. Never try to migrate data
> exported with exp into an existing table containing a nested column, the
> operation will most likely end with ORA-03113 "end-of-file on communication
> channel".

All pain and no gain? Received on Wed Dec 31 2003 - 06:12:15 CST