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June 02, 2006

Staff Development: VMS and Oracle views

This week I used my staff development time to learn more about the VMS commands and Oracle views. By far the most useful command is HELP. This will list most the available comands and how to use them. I found this site on the web to be very useful for learning VMS: OpenVMS beginner's FAQ. Another command that I didn't know existed: SEARCH. This is like a grep command where it will search through files in a directory for certain text. The syntax looks like this:

search "directory/file/* for wildcard" "text to look for"

Another command I found that'll be usefull too is spawn. This will spawn a process just like on a unix machine and you can set it so that it runs in the background. The syntax goes like this:

spawn/nowait/output=myoutput.txt myprog.exe

The other part of my staff development time was to research some of the views in oracle. A lot of these views are very useful when your looking for something specific in the database. For instance, your looking for the validation table behind the scenes for the ssbsect_subj_code in ssbsect. Since this is not nullable and has a constraint, we could do something like this to find more info:

select * from all_constraints where table_name like 'SSBSECT%';

This will return all the constraints for the SSBSECT table. Searching through the output I spot this:
FK1_SSBSECT_INV_STVSUBJ_CODE R SSBSECT
This shows me that the foreign key is with stvsubj. So that the table I was looking for.
There's lots of views available to most every developer with enough permissions. Here's a few that are very useful:

all_tables
all_views
all_indexes
all_table_columns
all_constraints
all_sequences

Posted by soukupm at June 2, 2006 01:59 PM

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