A CREATE statement with quoted fields in Oracle

Question

I have created a table in Oracle 10g using the following CREATE statement.

CREATE TABLE test ("id" NUMBER(35, 0) primary key, "description" VARCHAR2(250) not null);

The basic table structure looks like as follows.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Column Name       Data Type         Nullable     Default    Primary Key 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
id                NUMBER(35, 0)     No           -          1
description       VARCHAR2(250)     No           -          -

It should precisely be noted that the column names in this CREATE statement are enclosed within double quotes just for having a fun :)

After issuing this DDL statement, I issued three DML statements to add this many rows as follows.

INSERT INTO test VALUES (1, 'aaa');
INSERT INTO test VALUES (2, 'bbb');
INSERT INTO test VALUES (3, 'ccc');

And finally, the following SELECT statement was executed to verify, if those rows were inserted.

SELECT * FROM test;

Oracle indeed displays three rows exactly as inserted on executing this query.

---

But when I issue the following SELECT query,

SELECT id, description FROM test;

Oracle complains,

ORA-00904: "DESCRIPTION": invalid identifier

The following (same) query also,

SELECT id FROM test;

fails with the error,

ORA-00904: "ID": invalid identifier

The same is true for the query,

SELECT description FROM test;

The only SELECT query with the meta character * works. Listing fields in the SELECT clause doesn't work. Capitalizing the column names in the SELECT clause also doesn't work.

What is the reason behind it?

_{Please don't just say, Don't do this. I'm interested in knowing the reason behind it.}

Answer 1

OK, I won't say it, I'll just think it loudly.

The documentation clearly says that if you have quoted identifiers, you have to quote them everywhere (my italics for emphasis):

Every database object has a name. In a SQL statement, you represent the name of an object with a quoted identifier or a nonquoted identifier.

• A quoted identifier begins and ends with double quotation marks ("). If you name a schema object using a quoted identifier, then you must use the double quotation marks whenever you refer to that object.

• A nonquoted identifier is not surrounded by any punctuation.

So you always have to do:

SELECT "id", "description" FROM test;

Which is a pain. But obviously I'm just thinking that too, not really saying it.