ORA-00905: missing keyword against APEX

Question

Hi,
can someone explain my what is wrong with this query :
drop table emp_by_dept;
SELECT b.EMPLOYEE_ID, b.DEPARTMENT_ID INTO emp_by_dept
FROM
(SELECT EMPLOYEE_ID, DEPARTMENT_ID
FROM oehr_employees
WHERE department_id = 30) b;
The results gived by subqyery
SELECT EMPLOYEE_ID, DEPARTMENT_ID
FROM oehr_employees
WHERE department_id = 30
are:
EMPLOYEE_ID DEPARTMENT_ID
114 30
115 30
116 30
117 30
118 30
119 30
6 rows returned in 0.02 seconds Download

Answer 1

As Blushadow said, the select .. into syntax is used to select a single value into a variable, you cannot use it to create a table. That is SQL Server syntax. If you really want to drop and re-create the table every time, then the correct syntax is:
drop table emp_by_dept;
create table emp_by_dept as
SELECT EMPLOYEE_ID, DEPARTMENT_ID
FROM oehr_employees
WHERE department_id = 30;However, again as Blushadow pointed out, this is unnecessary, and generally considered bad practice in Oracle. You should either create the emp_by_dept once as a regular table, then truncate it and insert new data, or create the emp_by_dept table once as a Global Temporary Table, then use the GTT in whatever it is you are doing.
Having sais that, my feeling is that it is extremely unlikely that you actually need the emp_by_dept at all. In Oracle, readers do not block writers, so, in most cases, you can just use the select from oehr_employees directly wherever you are using emp_by_dept.
John