Is there a way to match all columns in a table?

Question

Oracle 11.1.0.7:
Is there any way to say match all the columns of Table A with Table B? For eg:
Table A
id
name
Table B
id
name
Is there a way to say match all the columns with similar column in other in a select instead of doing "where A.id = B.id and A.name = b.name"? I am trying to write a compare script to test that replication is indeed doing the right thing.

Answer 1

user628400 wrote:
If 2 columns have null values does it match that too? I'll run some tests.It does
SQL> ed
Wrote file afiedt.buf
  1  with a as (select 1 col1, null col2 from dual
  2             union all
  3             select 2 col1, null col2 from dual
  4             union all
  5             select null, null from dual),
  6       b as (select 1, null from dual
  7             union all
  8             select null, null from dual)
  9  select *
10    from a
11  minus
12  select *
13*   from b
SQL> /
      COL1 C
         2
While I was doing the comparision I found that if column x in Table A has "null" and same column x in table B has "null" and if I do "where A.x = B.x" then it doesn't return the row. I am not sure why. Does "minus" work the same way?That's because NULL will never equal any value (including NULL) and NULL will never not equal any value (including NULL). That is
NULL = 1 is unknown (which maps to false)
NULL = NULL is unknown
NULL != 1 is unknown
NULL != NULL is unknown
If you want to compare columns that may have NULL values, you need to use IS NULL and IS NOT NULL or use the NVL function to map NULL values to a non-NULL but impossible value, i.e.
WHERE (a.x = b.x OR
        (a.x is null and b.x is null))or
WHERE nvl(a.x,-17) = nvl(b.x,-17)assuming that -17 is not a valid value for either a.x or b.x
Justin