Re: Uniquely identifying a record in SQL without a unique key?

James

Just to mention a point - you said you would have liked the JDBC tutorial to mention the need for a primary key.

I think it may have been omitted because almost every non-IBM i DBMS strongly assumes there will be a primary key - it's possible not to, but that is a really strong assumption, supported in all their tools.

I suspect someone has recommended adding a primary key constraint to the table in question. That might need a new column, but all that is relatively easy using SQL DDL.

Naturally there are possible side effects to consider! :)

HTH
Vern

On 1/28/2013 11:01 AM, James H. H. Lampert wrote:

On 1/4/13 1:17 AM, Dave wrote:

Keep going James, you are doing some good work and we are all getting the
benefit!

Hmm.

At this point, I know that (at least in MySQL, which has no concept of
RRNs; hopefully I'll know about DB2/400 later this week) you literally
are not allowed to obtain an update cursor on a file that lacks a
primary key. (You ask for an updateable result set, and it gives you a
read-only one anyway).

And it turned out that the tutorial Mark recommended *did* mention that
you needed a primary key to get through the update-by-result-set
example. But that remark was so inconspicuous that I didn't even find it
until after I'd already come to that conclusion, and had spent over an
hour trying to find out how to set one up. (You'd think that if a
primary key were that important, the JDBC tutorial would have included
it in the environment set-up section, and both the MySQL docs and the
Sequel Pro helptext would make a point of telling you how to set one up,
as well.)

This morning, I went into MySQL again, with Sequel Pro, and created a
"multiple identical records" situation, then tried to change one through
Sequel Pro. Unlike my previous test with Squirrel on DB2/400, I was
actually able to change exactly one out of three identical records, and
when I looked at the underlying requests in the console, I found that it
had done an UPDATE request with WHERE clause on every field in the
record (much the same as Squirrel had done), but also added a "LIMIT 1"
clause.

Further research tells me that LIMIT is not standard SQL, any more than
RRN is.

Ye vish!

--
JHHL