Re: Oracle DBA Studio, almost useful

[Quoted] "Niall Litchfield" <n-litchfield_at_audit-commission.gov.uk> wrote in message news:3fc1e353$0$13348$ed9e5944_at_reading.news.pipex.net...
> "Jarmo" <jarmo_at_jarmo.com> wrote in message
> >
> > I suspect that it's complaining about the CONSTRAINT "" which it
inserted
> > when I requested that EMPLOYEEID had to be unique. Disregarding the
fact
> > that the tool is bugged in allowing me to specify an illegal combination
> of
> > options, why must I provide a 'constraint'? And what would it be? Why
> > isn't it sufficient to simply state that the column must contain unique
> > values?
>
> Because you need to create a unique constraint to enforce uniqueness.

[Quoted] Thanks for replying Niall. Presumably this constraint is just some kind of [Quoted] textual identifier so that when Oracle detects a duplicate value in the associated column(s) it can raise an exception containing that identifier and hence your software can identify which column(s) were in error. Sounds [Quoted] reasonable though I've never come across a situation in which anything other [Quoted] than a keyed field (or group of key fields) needed to be unique so one could [Quoted] readily infer the cause from the key violation without need for any additional information.

> > And, as an aside, can anyone tell me why Oracle persists in using arcane
> > terminology such as NVARCHAR2 (rather than String) and why it doesn't
> > support a boolean data type? Is it a deliberate attempt to deter the
> > casual user?
>
> Well at least it has that in common with sqlserver then, which also
doesn't
> support string datatypes. Perhaps that has someting to do with standard
> compliance.

It reminds me a little of COBOL with its PIC S9(6) notation and rather bizarre data representation.

> --
> Niall Litchfield
> Oracle DBA
> Audit Commission UK
Received on Mon Nov 24 2003 - 15:53:36 CET