What are the restrictions &pitfalls of renaming a table vs select * into...

Question

Hello all,
I've got a situation coming up possibly, that I'm looking at where I may need to rename a table that has about 3 TB of data in it.
I'd looked at doing the oracle RENAME command, and it mentions that some restrictions that would error out would be:
views, synonyms, and stored procedures and functions that reference the table.
I'd been looking around on different sites researching more, and found some saying that tables with foreign keys, check constraints would also error out on this....but in the Oracle docs I see it saying:
"Oracle Database automatically transfers integrity constraints, indexes, and grants on the old object to the new object."
Were the other non-Oracle site references maybe to older versions? I'm using 11Gr2.
The other part of this is that the app designers really want to recreate the original table. Essentially this is doing
TABLENAME1 -> TABLENAME1_OLD
Then recreating TABLENAME1 anew empty for new use.
My original thoughts were to do select * from TABLENAME1 into TABLENAME1_OLD, and then truncate TABLENAME1....but with the size of the data (and this will eventually be done in PROD), I"m trying to say that doing the RENAME and recreating the empty table would be less resource intensive.
Would the rename and recreate table be the way to go?
If so, then I need to make sure I know all the restrictions and pitfalls on rename would have....
Thanks in advance!!
cayenne

Answer 1

rp0428 wrote:
>
I've got a situation coming up possibly, that I'm looking at where I may need to rename a table that has about 3 TB of data in it.
I'd looked at doing the oracle RENAME command, and it mentions that some restrictions that would error out would be:
views, synonyms, and stored procedures and functions that reference the table.
I'd been looking around on different sites researching more, and found some saying that tables with foreign keys, check constraints would also error out on this....but in the Oracle docs I see it saying:
"Oracle Database automatically transfers integrity constraints, indexes, and grants on the old object to the new object."
Were the other non-Oracle site references maybe to older versions? I'm using 11Gr2.
The other part of this is that the app designers really want to recreate the original table. Essentially this is doing
TABLENAME1 -> TABLENAME1_OLD
Then recreating TABLENAME1 anew empty for new use.
My original thoughts were to do select * from TABLENAME1 into TABLENAME1_OLD, and then truncate TABLENAME1....but with the size of the data (and this will eventually be done in PROD), I"m trying to say that doing the RENAME and recreating the empty table would be less resource intensive.
Would the rename and recreate table be the way to go?
{quote}
You are missing a key piece of the requirements
What is the intended use of the OLD and the NEW tables?
Why do you need a new table with exactly the same name unless you intend to use it exactly the same way you were using the old table? And if that is the case it seems to me that other tables with foreign keys need to be truncated also and point to the new table and not the old one.Unfortunately, I don't know. This is just a request the devs have, and I'm not sure of their reasoning, but this is what they're asking for, so, I'm trying to research the best way to do what they request.
Thanks,
C