Question

I have the following as a CREATE TABLE in Oracle:

CREATE TABLE cs2_users (
    empnum     varchar2(12) PRIMARY KEY,
    toolsId    varchar2(20) 
        CONSTRAINT nn_cs2_users_toolsId NOT NULL
        CONSTRAINT fk_cs2_users_users FOREIGN KEY REFERENCES users.userid,
    admin      number(1,0) DEFAULT 0
        CONSTRAINT nn_cs2_users_admin NOT NULL
        CONSTRAINT ck_cs2_users_admin (admin IN (0,1)),
    givenname  varchar2(30) NOT NULL,
    middlename varchar2(30),
    sn         varchar2(30) NOT NULL,
    mail       varchar2(50) NOT NULL
);

However it fails with this error:

ERROR at line 5:
ORA-02253: constraint specification not allowed here`

When I connect using SQL*Plus, this is the version info:

SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.3.0 Production on Tue Dec 18 16:38:27 2012

Copyright (c) 1982, 2011, Oracle.  All rights reserved.


Connected to:
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.3.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP, Data Mining and Real Application Testing options

Help?

Answer 1

If you want to specify an inline constraint, that definition is separate from the definition of the column. You need to specify the type of the constraint if you are creating a CHECK constraint. And your foreign key constraint needs to specify which column you are referencing. So, for example, this will work

SQL> create table users( userid varchar2(20) primary key );

Table created.


SQL> CREATE TABLE cs2_users (
  2      empnum     varchar2(12) PRIMARY KEY,
  3      toolsId    varchar2(20) constraint nn_cs2_users_toolsId NOT NULL,
  4          CONSTRAINT fk_cs2_users_users FOREIGN KEY(toolsId) REFERENCES users(userid),
  5      admin      number(1,0) DEFAULT 0 constraint nn_cs2_users_admin NOT NULL,
  6          CONSTRAINT ck_cs2_users_admin CHECK(admin IN (0,1)),
  7      givenname  varchar2(30) NOT NULL,
  8      middlename varchar2(30),
  9      sn         varchar2(30) NOT NULL,
 10      mail       varchar2(50) NOT NULL
 11  );

Table created.

though it seems odd that the toolsId references the userId column from users. It would seem more likely that you would want the toolsId column to reference the toolsId column from a tools table or that you would want to name the column something like userId if you want to reference the userId column from users. But then I’d question why you have a separate cs2_users column rather than simply putting this information in the users table.