Calling a DDL in a procedure

Question

I am setting up a job in the database (81741 on windows2000)as:
insert into orig_backup select * from orig;
truncate table orig;
Db wouldn't let me do this 'cause truncate is a DDL. And, delete (instead of truncate) wouldn't help me much because it just deletes the row, not shrink the size of the orig table. My main aim is to shrink the size of the table by moving the data to backup table & then truncate.
Any inputs would be appreciated.
Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use the Oracle supplied package DBMS_SQL to parse and run just about any DDL sql, such as creating, dropping and truncating tables. Here is a an example which I just used succesfully on Oracle 8.0.6...
CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE TRUNCATE_TABLES (TABLE_NAME IN VARCHAR)
-- This function truncates the table with the name passed in.
-- Make sure that the variable to take in the return value is long enough to do so
IS
cur_id INTEGER;
rows_processed NUMBER;
BEGIN
cur_id := dbms_sql.OPEN_CURSOR;
dbms_sql.PARSE(cur_id, 'TRUNCATE TABLE ' || TABLE_NAME, dbms_sql.native);
rows_processed := dbms_sql.execute(cur_id);
dbms_sql.CLOSE_CURSOR(cur_id);
dbms_output.put_line('Truncated ' || TABLE_NAME);
EXCEPTION
WHEN OTHERS
THEN
dbms_sql.CLOSE_CURSOR(cur_id);
dbms_output.put_line('Failed to truncate ' || TABLE_NAME);
END;