Special Merge

An interesting question came up on the otn thread ( http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=9772504&#9772504) a couple of days ago. The original poster was asking on how to avoid superfluous updates when using the MERGE command. He said that he wants the update to start only if one of the columns to be matched has been changed; otherwise he would like the update to be ignored by the MERGE command when a matching key has been found.

I included my answer within the thread. How, in your case, would you proceed to accomplish the original poster requirement?

On the use of dbms_metadata.get_ddl

A question recently came into an oracle French forum (http://www.developpez.net/forums/d1117051/bases-donnees/oracle/source-vue-format-text/)  asking about how to get a DDL of views containing a given text

I thought it is worth writing here the English translation of my French answer to that thread. I will start by creating a view in which I will use the term ‘Mohamed’

mhouri.world> create view view_test as
2  select *
3  from emp
4  where ename = 'Mohamed';
View created.

And now we would like to get views that contains the text ‘Mohamed’ in their DDL creation script.

mhouri.world> SELECT *
2    FROM
3    (SELECT
4           dbms_metadata.get_ddl('VIEW', view_name) txt
5     FROM  user_views
6    ) ww
7  WHERE
8     dbms_lob.instr (ww.txt, 'Mohamed') != 0
9  ;

CREATE OR REPLACE FORCE VIEW "MHOURI"."VIEW_TEST" ("EMPNO", "ENAME", "JOB", "MGR
", "HIREDATE", "SAL", "COMM", "DEPTNO") AS
select "EMPNO","ENAME","JOB","MGR","HIREDATE","SAL","COMM","DEPTNO"
from emp
where ename = 'Mohamed'

Hope this will help.