Re: Returning "system views" as tables.

Jeffrey wrote:

> My company has outsourced our billing system to an out-of-town company
> that uses Oracle 8i.
>
> We were provided with the Oracle 8i client, which I have installed on
> my Win2K server, and I am configuring the DNS for use.
>
> I can successfully connect to the database with SQL*Plus, and can also
> successfully connect to the database from within Microsoft SQL Server
> 2000 and Dreamweaver MX.
>
> The problem I am having is getting the system tables to show up
> visually in my development environments. When I see the list of
> available tables, I only see three, created under the "scott" user.
> The system tables are not visible, which is where all of my customer
> information lies.
>
> Now, from what I have been told, the system tables have been shared to
> my user account as system views. And if I manually execute a SQL
> query (i.e. type out the SELECT command...), I can pull a recordset
> from the system tables. So I know I have read access to this data.
>
> Since I did not design the database structure and am not very familiar
> with the myriad of complexities our "outsourced" programmers build
> into it, it would be a great boon to be able to visually browse the
> table structures, column names, etc. so that I can build my queries
> from within MSSQL and Dreamweaver.
>
> I've searched through the documenation I have for Oracle, for the ODBC
> drivers and through UseNet.
>
> I found one article that the older version of the Microsoft ODBC
> Driver (version 2.0) contained a custom option called "Return system
> views as system table" which could be checked. I am SURE this is what
> I need.
>
> However, the current version of the driver (2.5) does not have this
> option. I also haven't found a way to download the old version and
> downgrade my MDAC.
>
> Does anyone know of any way I could enable this feature?
>
> Any help would be a godsend.
>
> Thanks much,
> Jeffrey

The chances of them giving you access to the system tables, unless that is part of your company's agreement is remarkably close to zero. To find out what objects you can see perform the following:

SELECT object_name, object_type
FROM all_objects
ORDER BY object_type, object_name;

Daniel Morgan Received on Mon Sep 02 2002 - 12:56:10 CDT