View Creation using DDL trigger

Question

I am looking back at Oracle (11g) development after few years for my team project and need help. We are trying to implement a POC where any add/drop column will drop and recreate a corrosponding view. View refers to a Mapping table for producing its alias names and selection of columns.

My solutions:

--1. DDL Trigger that scans for Add Column, Drop Column -> Identifies Column Names -> Updates Field_Map table -> Drops View -> Creates View with Field_Map table alias names

Challenge: Received recursive trigger error because of View creation inside DDL

--2. DDL Trigger scans for Add Column, Drop Column -> -> Updates Field Map table -> Writes identified column names, tables to Audit_DDL table -> DML trigger on Audit_DDL table fires -> Disables DDL trigger (to avoid recursion) -> Drops view -> Creates view with Field_Map table alias names

Challenge: Received recursive trigger error. I think, it is still considering whole flow as one transaction. Separating create view under DML trigger didn't help.

so, I am thinking of alternatives:

--3. Store Trigger, Tables in Schema1 and View Schema2. I am expecting, this may avoid recursion since create view will now happen on schema2 and trigger is built on schema1.

--4. Create a Stored Procedure which scans for Audit_DDL entries (from #2) for tables, columns updated. Creates views and marks checked for processed Audit_DDL entries. Hourly job now runs this procedure.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance for helping me out!

Answer 1

If you want to do DDL from a trigger, it would need to be asynchronous. The simplest solution would be for the DDL trigger to submit a job using the DBMS_JOB package that would execute whatever DDL you want to do. That job would not run until the triggering transaction (the ALTER statement) committed. But it would probably run a few seconds later (depending on how many other jobs are running, how many jobs are allowed, etc.). Whether you build the DDL statement you want to execute in the trigger and just pass it to the job or whether you store the information the job will need in a table and pass some sort of key (i.e. the object name) and let the job assemble the DDL statement is an implementation detail.

That being said, this seems like a really exceptionally poor architecture. If you are adding or removing a column, that is something that should be going through a proper change control process. If the change is going through change control, it should be easy enough to include the changes to the views in the same script. And applications that depend on the views should be tested as part of the change control process. If the change is not going through change control and columns are being added to or removed from views willy-nilly, you've got much bigger problems in the business process and you're very likely to cause one or more applications to barf in strange and wonderful ways at seemingly obscure points in time.