Oracle and adding a default value to a table column
I placed a column in a table of mine, let’s call itfoo. Such column should have a numeric value, but I forgot to set up a default value for the column when I added to the table. The end result was that, querying the table, new tuples have a null value into such column.
No matter, I thought, it is as easy as doing:
ALTER TABLE mytable MODIFY ( foo default 0 );
Ehm…no!
In fact, while this was working for new tuples, it did not repair old
null ones, so that I had to manually do a:
UPDATE mytable SET foo = 0 where foo is null;
Apparently,
default definitions work differently in Oracle than in PostgreSQL, and most notably as I’m thinking they should work!