Re: adding columns to system tables

While this practice would be frowned on, I have had occasion to do something similar myself.

Developers were required to have the ability to see source code in stored procedures in production instances through SQL Navigator, without granting the database privileges that would normally make this possible.

Please don't lecture me on change control on this, the damagers backed the developers on this and we had no choice. We tried to sell them on the virtues of competent change control. But that requires competent duhvelopers.

But I digress.

My solution was to create modified copies of ALL_OBJECTS and ALL_SOURCE named ALL_OBJECTS2 and ALL_SOURCE2. The developers in question had private synonyms named ALL_SOURCE and ALL_OBJECTS that pointed to the modified objects.

The developers were happy, the damagers were happy, and I was happy for having something interesting to do.

I wouldn't recommend doing this except in extreme circumstances such as this though, and not for support reasons, but because modifying these views is *extremely* difficult and not for the faint of heart.

They will also likely break after the next database upgrade.

YMMV Jared

On Friday 18 May 2001 09:25, Greg Schraiber wrote:
> Does anyone know if it is 'safe' to add additional columns
> to user_tab_columns? I am running 8.1.5. I would use the new
> columns to tell the application software which columns on
> any one table are user editable by a dynamically generated
> dialog form.
>
> Thanks,
> Greg

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Author: Jared Still
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