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stopher2475Flag for United States of America

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Error in Procedure to Rebuild Index

I was attempting to make a stored procedure to rebuild some indexes on a ginormous table I have to refresh monthly.

create or replace 
PROCEDURE                                                                                                       
SP_REBUILD_INDEXES AS
BEGIN
  --NPI INDEXES

  ALTER INDEX "VALIDATION_TOOLS"."PX_NPI" REBUILD;

  COMMIT;
END SP_REBUILD_INDEXES;

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I get this error when I try to compile:
Error(6,3): PLS-00103: Encountered the symbol "ALTER" when expecting one of the following:     ( begin case declare exit for goto if loop mod null pragma    raise return select update while with <an identifier>    <a double-quoted delimited-identifier> <a bind variable> <<    continue close current delete fetch lock insert open rollback    savepoint set sql execute commit forall merge pipe purge

Can I not put the rebuild in a procedure?
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Avatar of slightwv (䄆 Netminder)
slightwv (䄆 Netminder)

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I see that you named your procedure "SP_REBUILD_INDEXES".  That looks like a SQL Server-style name.  If you are familiar with SQL Server, but new to Oracle, be careful!  Yes, these are both "SQL compliant" databases.  But, beyond support for the four basic SQL verbs (select, insert, update and delete) and storing data in tables that contain rows and columns, there are a *LOT* more differences than similarities between SQL Server and Oracle.

Don't assume that the SQL Server way of getting things done is "normal" and Oracle's way is "odd".  They are just different.  Oracle is optimized for performance, stability and security.  SQL Server (to me at least) appears to be optimized for: ease-of-use and  compatibility with Micosoft programming tools.

Oracle stored procedures only support the four basic SQL verbs directly, because Oracle does "early binding" (at compile time) of stored procedure code to the corresponding DB objects, to give maximum run-time performance.

Also, be aware that for things like record-locking, read consistency and whether temporary tables need to be used or not, there are *MANY* differences between SQL Server and Oracle!
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ASKER

Thanks for the suggestions. It's compiling now. I'm going to test running it in the application tomorrow and post my results back.
@markgeer - You're correct, my background is more SQL server. Definately a learning curve for the Oracle way of doing things. =)
Avatar of slightwv (䄆 Netminder)
slightwv (䄆 Netminder)

Then to add to Oracle training:
 ALTER INDEX "VALIDATION_TOOLS"."PX_NPI" REBUILD;

Double quotes are bad in Oracle.  It forces case sensitivity.  By default Oracle converts all object names to upper case.

So:
create table tAb1(cOl1 char(1));  --will run
select CoL1 from TAB1;
select col1 from tab1;
select COL1 from TaB1;
all work.

When you use double quotes around an object, it forces case sensitivity:
create table "tAb1"("cOl1" char(1));  --will run
select CoL1 from TAB1;
select col1 from tab1;
select COL1 from TaB1;
all fail.

Best to not use them anywhere.  Then you don't get caught.

Change the code to:
execute immediate 'ALTER INDEX VALIDATION_TOOLS.PX_NPI REBUILD';

Since it was already uppercase in the original code, I never bothered to mention it.
Seems to be working now. Thanks for everyones help.
Good tip on the quotes signaling case sensitivity. Was not aware of that.