Stephen's Oracle Blog

This just came up on the mailing list for my local Linux Users Group following last night's meeting (which I didn't attend), the original mail and my response is below: > In the pub, there was an interesting conversation going on regarding > validation of data in databases. > > Excuse the omissions, as I said, it was overheard > > Someone brought up the point that in databaseX If say, you have a > varchar field set to a limit of 10, and put 26 chars of data into it > databaseX silently truncates it. > > So my question is, in your opinion, should it be up to the front end or > the database to do this kind of data validation? > I'm a Database Administrator, mostly working with Oracle. The reverse of this problem (data validated in the client but not in the database) is something I come accross a lot. Most RDBMS/ODBMS/ORDBMS, certainly any that can claim to be enterprise class, will have functionality to implement data validation (key con...

This entry is partly an aide memoire for me, partly to try to get something that has been keeping me awake for the past hour or so out of my brain so I can sleep and partly in the hope that someone can suggest a way forward. A quick bit of background. Until April 06 most of our major systems were looked after by an external Faccilities Management company. In April 06 IT was kind of outsourced to a joint venture company, support of the systems transferred to that company and a couple of the DBAs transferred in as well under TUPE. A reccurring problem on one of the systems is that the users keep deleting records which, by law, they must not delete so we (actually one of the DBAs who transferred in who is responsible for that system) has to restore from backup to another machine and copy the deleted records over (she's tried using LogMiner but finds it too unwieldy). The core problem is that the application is faulty and lets the users delete the records when it shouldn't. The...