Re: LONG vs. Multiple VARCHAR2

Contractor - Yuk Hon "Johnny" Chan <jychan_at_corp.hp.com> writes:  

>Also, you may want to consider separating the long field out to a
>separate table to improve performance in table reads (unless your app
>always reads a long along with the rest of the fields, in which
>case it's somewhat mitigated).
   

Keeping long fields in their own tables, sharing only the primary key of the associated record, is a good idea for programming convience, too. -
The reason is you cannot use INSERT INTO ... SELECT FROM ... syntax to copy data involving long fields, because of the restriction against using long's in subqueries. Copying data containing long fields requires an explicit PL/SQL cursor loop. Keeping long's in their own tables minimizes the need for these loops in your code.  

• Rick --

(Rick Rutt is a system architect living and working in Midland, Michigan.) Received on Wed Aug 09 1995 - 00:00:00 CEST