Question

Lets say I already have 3 columns A,B,C in my table Tb. I want to add a new column M between B and C. How can I do this ?

After adding M,my table should look like – A B M C and NOT A B C M ?

Answer 1

The simple answer is that you can’t. Columns are always added at the end. However, you shouldn’t care about the order of columns in a table since you should always be explicitly listing columns in your queries and in your DML. And you should always have an interface layer (a view, for example) where, if order is important, you can add the new column in the appropriate place.

If you are really determined, you can create a new table with the new column order, move the data to the new table, drop the old table, and rename the new table. You’ll need to recreate any indexes, constraints, or triggers on the table. Something like

ALTER TABLE tb
  ADD( M NUMBER );

CREATE TABLE tb_new
AS
SELECT a, b, m, c
  FROM tb;

DROP TABLE tb;

ALTER TABLE tb_new 
  RENAME TO tb;

I’m not sure whether it’s an option in the express edition (I tend to doubt it is but I don’t have an XE database handy to verify) but you could also potentially use the DBMS_REDEFINITION package as Barbara shows in that example. Behind the scenes, Oracle is doing basically the same thing that is done above but with some added materialized view logs to allow applications to continue to access the table during the operation.

If you find yourself caring about the order of columns in a table, though, you’re much better off stopping to figure out what you’ve done wrong rather than continuing to move forward on either path. It should be exceptionally, exceptionally rare that you would care about the physical order of columns in a table.