Oracle 11g VARRAY of OBJECTS
Question
I have the following statements in Oracle 11g:
CREATE TYPE person AS OBJECT (
name VARCHAR2(10),
age NUMBER
);
CREATE TYPE person_varray AS VARRAY(5) OF person;
CREATE TABLE people (
somePeople person_varray
)
How can i select the name value for a person i.e.
SELECT somePeople(person(name)) FROM people
Thanks
Solution
I'm pretty sure that:
What you're doing isn't what I'd be doing. It sort of completely violates relational principles, and you're going to end up with an object/type system in Oracle that you might not be able to change once it's been laid down. The best use I've seen for SQL TYPEs (not PL/SQL types) is basically being able to cast a ref cursor back for pipelined functions.
You have to unnest the collection before you can query it relationally, like so:
SELECT NAME FROM (SELECT SP.* FROM PEOPLE P, TABLE(P.SOME_PEOPLE) SP)
That'll give you all rows, because there's nothing in your specifications (like a PERSON_ID attribute) to restrict the rows.
The Oracle Application Developer's Guide - Object Relational Features discusses all of this in much greater depth, with examples.
OTHER TIPS
To insert query:-
insert into people values (
person_varray(person('Ram','24'))
);
To select :-
select * from people;
SELECT NAME FROM (SELECT SP.* FROM PEOPLE P, TABLE(P.somePeople) SP)
While inserting a row into people table use constructor of
person_varray and then the constructor
of person type for each project.
The above INSERT command
creates a single row in people table.
select somePeople from people ;
person(NAME, age)
---------------------------------------------------
person_varray(person('Ram', 1),
To update the query will be:-
update people
set somePeople =
person_varray
(
person('SaAM','23')
)