Re: ORA-03113 Error

Al Willis wrote:
> Daniel,
>
> I understand your point about normalization and how the table structure I
> presented might look like what you said. But that is not the case here.
>
> This table is only one of about 350 that my application creates and manages.
> This table holds data for what is called a Loop Drawing. Each loop drawing
> can hold up to 350 entries of data. A loop drawing is basically a wiring
> checkout drawing for related circuits in industrial, chemical, power, and
> offshore facilities. The entries contain data for wire termination points,
> cable numbers, and instrumentation. There is absolutely NO correlation
> between different loop drawing types. That is to say one loop drawing type
> might be radically different in purpose from another loop drawing. On a job
> that my industry would consider a moderate to small job, there were about 80
> different loop models. A model is a template that many loops can be derived
> from. One typical job had 1600 loop drawings, (number of records in
> LOOPDAT), derived from 80 different loop models. Larger jobs would
> potentially have more loop models.
>
> One approach would have been to create a different table for each loop
> model. This would have been at the same time both time consuming and very
> restrictive, as every time a wiring method was changed, a new loop model
> table would have to be created. This would have to be thought up ahead of
> time by the programmer, or I would have to allow the end users the ability
> the create new tables on the fly. Way beyond their skill level. That
> absolutely would not work. It has been tried before by others and failed
> miserabley. That is why the column names of my LOOPDAT table are so
> generic, and also why there are so many of them. It is the ultimate in
> normalization. My application allows the end user to map data from related
> tables in the database to specific fields in the LOOPDAT table. The
> fieldnames themselves (A001-A350) have no strategic purpose assigned to them
> by me the programmer. They are only placeholders for disparate data and are
> completly reusable as required by the end-user.
>
> I hope that I am describing this clearly enough. The real problem that I
> have (other than Oracle choking on the table) is that it takes somewhat
> longer to populate a grid with 370 or so columns. This is the most sluggish
> table in my application. That is reason enough to look at trying another
> approach. My application has been designed to use 6 different database
> back-ends interchangeably. They are SQL Server, Interbase, Oracle, DB2,
> Adaptive Server Anywhere, and MySQL. I've already run into table row size
> limits on SQL Server (8100 bytes or so), so I'm going to take this
> opportunity to restructure the LOOPDAT table into 5 smaller parts.
>
> If you are interested, for more information on what a loop drawing is,
> please see http://www.inmaster.com/ssLoop.htm. And my apologies for the
> lecture in case you are already familiar with loop drawings.
>
> Al

Thanks. I now understand what you are trying to do. I still think you can accomplish it using dynamic SQL with a vertical structure. I'd suggest you also look at modelling as object_relational with user-defined data types.

I understand why you did what you did. But it still causes me an incredible amount of nauseau.

-- 
Daniel Morgan
http://www.outreach.washington.edu/ext/certificates/oad/oad_crs.asp
http://www.outreach.washington.edu/ext/certificates/aoa/aoa_crs.asp
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace 'x' with a 'u' to reply)