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Answering a reader’s question: How can you sort data inside an Oracle table view column? This blog post shows you how to perform the trick, but for the record I’m not a fan of nested tables. A table view column is an Oracle specific user-defined type (UDT), and is nested table or varray of a scalar data type.

Oracle’s assigned a formal name to this type of UDT. It’s now labeled an Attribute Data Type (ADT). The ADT doesn’t allow you to update nested elements outside of PL/SQL program units.

This blog post reviews table view columns, and extends concepts from Oracle Database 11g & MySQL 5.6 Developer Handbook (by the way virtually everything in the book is relevant from MySQL 5.1 forward). It demonstrates how you can use PL/SQL user-defined functions (UDFs) to supplement the SQL semantics for updating nested tables, and then it shows how you can reshuffle (sort) data store the sorted data in table view columns.

Before you implement table view columns, you should answer two design questions and one relational modeling principal. You should also understand that this direction isn’t portable across database implementations. It currently supported fully by the Oracle database and mostly by PostgreSQL database. You can find how to join nested tables helpful in understanding the UPDATE statements used in this posting, and this earlier post on UPDATE and DELETE statements.

Design Questions:

• Should you implement full object types with access methods in PL/SQL? The object type solution says there is no value in the nested data outside of the complete object. While choosing the table view column solution says that there is value to just implementing a nested list without element handling methods.
• Should you embed the elements in an XML_TYPE? An XML solution supports hierarchical node structures more naturally, like when you only access child nodes through the parent node. While choosing the table view column solution says that you want to avoid the XML Software Development Kit and that the data set is small and more manageable in a table view column.

Design Principle:

• Should you implement an ID-dependent relational modeling concept? An ID-dependent model replaces the primary and foreign keys with the relative position of parent and child elements. This is the design adopted when you choose a table view column, and it is more complex than single subject relational tables.

You should note that table view columns are inherently static at creation. You must also update the entire nested table view column when using Oracle SQL. Oracle SQL does let you modified attributes of object types in nested tables, as qualified in my new book (page 252).

Any attempt to modify a table view column element in SQL raises an ORA-25015 error. The error message states that (you) cannot perform DML on this nested TABLE VIEW COLUMN.

You can update the table view column value by replacing it with a new collection, and that’s done with a PL/SQL function. This type of function preserves the ordered list in the table view column by finding and replacing an element in the collection.

Unfortunately, developers who use nested tables typically design table view columns with an internal ordering scheme. That means the collection is ordered during insert or update. This type of design relies on the fact that you can’t change the order without re-writing the stored structure.

While common for those you use these, it is a bad practice to rely on the ordering of elements in a collection. At least, it’s a bad practice when we’re trying to work within the relational model. All that aside, here’s how you ensure element updates while preserving element position:

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CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION update_collection
( old_element_collection  STREET_LIST
, old_element_value   VARCHAR2
, new_element_value   VARCHAR2 ) RETURN STREET_LIST IS
 
  -- Declare and initial a new counter.
  lv_counter  NUMBER := 1;
 
  -- Declare local return collection variable.
  lv_element_collection  STREET_LIST :=  street_list();
 
BEGIN
  FOR i IN 1..old_element_collection.COUNT LOOP
    IF NOT old_element_collection(i) = old_element_value THEN
      lv_element_collection.EXTEND;
      lv_element_collection(lv_counter) := old_element_collection(i);
    ELSE
      lv_element_collection.EXTEND;
      lv_element_collection(lv_counter) := new_element_value;
    END IF;
    lv_counter := lv_counter + 1;
  END LOOP;
 
  RETURN lv_element_collection;
END update_collection;
/

Then, you can use the user-defined function (UDF) inside a SQL UPDATE statement, like this:

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UPDATE TABLE (SELECT e.home_address
              FROM    employee e
              WHERE   e.employee_id = 1) e
SET   e.street_address = update_collection(e.street_address, 'Suite 525','Suite 522')
,     e.city = 'Oakland'
WHERE e.address_id = 1;

The UPDATE_COLLECTION function replaces Suite 525 with Suite 522, and preserves the sequence of elements in a new nested table. The UPDATE statement assigns the modified nested table to the table view column. You can find the code to create the employee table in Chapter 6 (pages 148-149), and the code to insert the default data in Chapter 8 (page 229) of Oracle Database 11g & MySQL 5.6.

The lv_counter variable could be replaced with a reference to the for loop’s iterator (i) because the counts of both collections are the same. I opted for the local variable to make the code easier to read.

While common for those you use these, it is a bad practice to rely on the ordering of elements in a collection. At least, it’s a bad practice when we’re trying to work within the relational model. Along the same line of thought, you also have the ability of removing elements from a table view column with a similar PL/SQL function. You could write the function like this:

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CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION delete_from_collection
( old_element_collection  STREET_LIST
, old_element_value   VARCHAR2 ) RETURN STREET_LIST IS
 
  -- Declare and initial a new counter.
  lv_counter  NUMBER := 1;
 
  -- Declare local return collection variable.
  lv_element_collection  STREET_LIST :=  street_list();
 
BEGIN
 
  FOR i IN 1..old_element_collection.COUNT LOOP
    IF NOT old_element_collection(i) = old_element_value THEN
      lv_element_collection.EXTEND;
      lv_element_collection(lv_counter) := old_element_collection(i);
      lv_counter := lv_counter + 1;
    END IF;
  END LOOP;
 
  RETURN lv_element_collection;
END delete_from_collection;
/

Then, you can use the user-defined function (UDF) to delete an element from the collection inside a SQL UPDATE statement, like this:

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UPDATE TABLE (SELECT e.home_address
              FROM    employee1 e
              WHERE   e.employee_id = 1) e
SET   e.street_address = delete_from_collection(e.street_address,'Suite 522')
,     e.city = 'Oakland'
WHERE e.address_id = 1;

After understanding all that, let’s examine how you sort data in a nested table or varray of a scalar data type (the basis of a table view column). The easiest way is a BULK COLLECT INTO statement nested inside a function, like this:

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CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION sort_collection
( old_element_collection  STREET_LIST) RETURN STREET_LIST IS
 
  -- Declare and initial a new counter.
  lv_counter  NUMBER := 1;
 
  -- Declare local return collection variable.
  lv_element_collection  STREET_LIST :=  street_list();
 
BEGIN
 
  -- Sort a collection alphabetically based on case sensitivity.
  SELECT   column_value BULK COLLECT INTO lv_element_collection
  FROM     TABLE(old_element_collection)
  ORDER BY column_value;
 
  RETURN lv_element_collection;
END sort_collection;
/

You could test it with this:

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SELECT   column_value
FROM     TABLE(sort_collection(street_list('Adams', 'Lewis', 'Clark', 'Fallon')));

Then, you can use the user-defined function (UDF) to update a table view column like this:

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UPDATE TABLE (SELECT e.home_address
              FROM    employee1 e
              WHERE   e.employee_id = 1) e
SET   e.street_address = sort_collection(e.street_address)
,     e.city = 'Oakland'
WHERE e.address_id = 1;

The funny thing about database solutions these days is that some Java developers don’t appreciate the simplicity of SQL and PL/SQL and would solve the problem with Java. Especially, if it was an case insensitive sort operation. That’s the hard way (easy way at the bottom), but I figured it should be thrown in because some folks think everything is generic if written in Java. Though, I thought making it proprietary would increase the irony and wrote it as a Java library for Oracle.

Here’s the Java library, which you can run from the SQL*Plus command line, SQL Developer, or that pricey Toad:

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CREATE OR REPLACE AND COMPILE JAVA SOURCE NAMED "SortOracleList" AS
 
  // Import required classes.
  import java.io.*;
  import java.security.AccessControlException;
  import java.sql.*;
  import java.util.Arrays;
  import oracle.sql.driver.*;
  import oracle.sql.ArrayDescriptor;
  import oracle.sql.ARRAY;
 
  // Define class.
  public class DemoSort {
    public static ARRAY getList(oracle.sql.ARRAY list) throws SQLException, AccessControlException {
 
      // Convert Oracle data type to Java data type.
      String[] unsorted = (String[])list.getArray();
 
      // Sort elements.
      Arrays.sort(unsorted, String.CASE_INSENSITIVE_ORDER);
 
      // Define a connection (this is for Oracle 11g).
      Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:default:connection:");
 
      // Declare a mapping to the schema-level SQL collection type.
      ArrayDescriptor arrayDescriptor = new ArrayDescriptor("STRINGLIST",conn);
 
      // Translate the Java String{} to the Oracle SQL collection type.
      ARRAY sorted = new ARRAY(arrayDescriptor,conn,((Object[])unsorted));
    return sorted; }}
/

Then, you write the PL/SQL wrapper like this:

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CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION sortTable(list STRINGLIST) RETURN STRINGLIST IS
LANGUAGE JAVA
NAME 'DemoSort.getList(oracle.sql.ARRAY) return oracle.sql.ARRAY';
/

You could test the case insensitive sort with this:

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SELECT   column_value
FROM     TABLE(sort_collection(street_list('Adams', 'adams', 'Lewis', 'Clark', 'Fallon')));

Naturally, it ignores the fact you could do it like this without Java by using the UPPER function in the purely PL/SQL SORT_COLLECTION function shown earlier in this post:

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    -- Sort a collection alphabetically based on case insensitive comparison.
    SELECT   column_value BULK COLLECT INTO lv_element_collection
    FROM     TABLE(old_element_collection)
    ORDER BY UPPER(column_value);

Anyway, it’s a bunch of thoughts about writing solutions for table view columns. Hope it helps those interested in nested tables.