Case: In a table there is a column customer_code and a column status. The allowable values of status are I, P, C, E. The status indicates that a record is just inserted (I), in process (P), completed (C) or in error (E). The constraint that has to be implemented: the combination of customer_code and (status = I or status = P) must occur only once.
The ‘traditional’ way of implementing this constraint would be to create a set of triggers and to do the check in the after statement trigger.
But it can also be implemented using a unique function based index:
create unique index cps_i2
on orm_customer_payments ( decode(status, 'I', customer_code
, 'P', customer_code
, null
)
);
please find the solution at –
http://plsqlnotes.blogspot.com/search/label/Function%20Based%20Index
Thank you for the “Using unique function based index as check constraintâ€. It helps a bit but there are still not possible to create more complex constrains.
Hi Jurgen,
thanks for the pointer. I was doing it the different way around. Creating a materialized view that contained the function as a column and creating a unique key on that materialized view. Talk about the long way around ;-), this will make it a lot ‘smoother’.
Regards,
Robert