UNION behavior

Help needed!!

I need to UNION two tables that have the exact same DDL. There are fields which have specific precision such as NUMBER(10,0), NUMBER(5,0), etc. and all columns are defined as NOT NULL.

But when I do the UNION I lose this information both with regard to the precision and the NOT NULL restriction. The level above me must have this information to properly parse the sqlda. The way in which the results are interpreted cannot be changed because the same processing routine is generalized for many different static queries. This is not an issue in DB2, only Oracle.

I've read Oracle docs about defining an object and selecting the two tables into the object, but in order to create the object I would need to reference the DDL of one of the two tables. The VARCHAR columns in the two tables are defined differently based on whether it's a Unicode installation or not.

My questions are:
1) Is there a way to tell the UNION to retain ALL the attributes using Table A as the reference or Table B?

• OR - 2) Is there a way to create an object that dynamically uses the variable names and attributes of another table rather than statically as Oracle docs suggest.

For performance reasons, I'd prefer to use the UNION method.

To whoever gets me answer, THANK YOU!! Received on Wed Sep 06 2000 - 19:35:26 CDT