I am a direct markting manager and I rely on the integrity of the
customer contact data in our Oracle database. In order to ensure this
integrity, I need to carry out mass updates, e.g. to update
postcodes/zip codes. For the forseeable future my IT department
doesn't have anyone availble to do this work for me, therefore I have
suggested I do it myself by learning to use SQL*Plus. I have a good
understanding of the fundamentals of relational databases and have
used MS Access to an advanced level, including extracting information
from the Oracle database using very complex queries, and then running
the kind of queries on that extracted data that I would be running on
the live tables. I am very confident that I can do this work safely as
I know the database inside out, however they are understandably very
reluctant to let me do this for danger of damaging the data. Does
anyone have an opinion as to whether I'm going about this the right
way and, if so, any steps I could take to safeguard against potential
problems?
N.B. I would only have access to update information in 2 tables,
neither of which affect anything else in our system, also these tables
are regularly backed up and it wouldn't be a major problem if we had
to revert to a table a week or so old if something went wrong with the
live version.
Received on Thu Apr 01 2004 - 10:43:39 CST
