Help with Oracle Database XE edition tutorial

Question

Hi,
I am a student and our instructor has told us to install 11g and now has us running through the 10g tutorial and I've run into a number of problems. There is one issue that I cannot find the solution for and was hoping that somebody could give me a hand.
The tutorial has us make a table. This works...
CREATE TABLE audit_record_tb1
user_value varchar2(25),
date_recorded timestamp(6)
Later on, we have to create a trigger that will write to the table when another table's values are updated. This one doesn't work. It gives an error stating 'too many values'
INSERT INTO audit_record_tb1
VALUES(SYS_CONTEXT('userenv', 'current_user'),
sysdate, :old.employee_id, :old.salary, :new.salary);
EXCEPTION
WHEN OTHERS THEN
RAISE_APPLICATION_ERROR(-10001, 'audit trigger failure');
There has been no instruction to add columns to the audit_record_tb1 table and I am at a loss as to what the issue is at this point.
Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

963729 wrote:
There has been no instruction to add columns to the audit_record_tb1 table and I am at a loss as to what the issue is at this point.Maybe the tutorial doesn't want you to insert 5 values into a 2 column table? Ok what is the tables task and what attributes are there?
It is named: audit_record_tb1. So the purpose is probably to track everything that was changed in some other table. The columns (=attributes) are: user_value and date_recorded.
Date_recorded clear is the data when some action took place (=sysdate). User_value could be the old value from some column or it could be the user who did the task.
As you noticed there might be some information mission. Like which column does the old value come from etc.
Of cause you could insert all this into the user_value column. Unfortunatly that is no a very large column (25 char).
You solution to add new columns is a good idea. The oracle documentation has the syntax diagrams to help you do this. It is a god idea to bookmark the documentation.
Homepage 11g: http://www.oracle.com/pls/db112/homepage
And the SQL Language reference: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/server.112/e26088/toc.htm
Another solution could be to insert each old value into a separate row.
Something like
INSERT INTO audit_record_tb1
VALUES(to_char(:old.employee_id), sysdate);
INSERT INTO audit_record_tb1
VALUES(to_char(:old.salary), sysdate);
...It is not needed to insert the new value. Why? because this value is still in the current record. And if that record is changed again the trigger will write another entry to the audit table.
Edited by: Sven W. on Oct 8, 2012 9:16 PM