Question

We are trying to copy the current row of a table to mirror table by using a trigger before delete / update. Below is the working query

 BEFORE UPDATE OR DELETE 
  ON CurrentTable FOR EACH ROW
  BEGIN
      INSERT INTO MirrorTable
 ( EMPFIRSTNAME,
   EMPLASTNAME,
   CELLNO,
   SALARY
    )
VALUES
 ( :old.EMPFIRSTNAME,
   :old.EMPLASTNAME,
   :old.CELLNO,
   :old.SALARY
    ); 
END;

But the problem is we have more than 50 coulmns in the current table and dont want to mention all those column names. Is there a way to select all coulmns like
:old.*

SELECT  * INTO MirrorTable FROM CurrentTable

Any suggestions would be helpful.

Thanks,

Answer 1

Realistically, no. You’ll need to list all the columns.

• You could, of course, dynamically generate the trigger code pulling the column names from DBA_TAB_COLUMNS. But that is going to be dramatically more work than simply typing in 50 column names.
• If your table happens to be an object table, :new would be an instance of that object so you could insert that. But it would be rather rare to have an object table.