ORA-00943: cluster does not exist

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This is the first of a series of articles regarding Oracle cluster tables.
Index clustered tables and hash clustered tables are covered in detail in the Concepts book and the full syntax of the related commands can be found in the SQL Reference.

There is nothing intriguing in this error, for instance, suppose to execute:

create table dummy_table (
code  number(5,0),
lang  varchar2(30),
descr  varchar2(1024)
) cluster dummy_cluster (code)
/
ORA-00943: cluster does not exist

drop CLUSTER dummy_cluster
/
ORA-00943: cluster does not exist

Evidently, in both cases the dummy cluster did not exist.

The same error is also returned attempting to drop a cluster in another user's schema:

drop CLUSTER user2.dummy_cluster
/
ORA-00943: cluster does not exist

In this case it is necessary to hold DROP ANY CLUSTER privilege.


You can check for the existence of a cluster by querying the following dictionary views:

select * from user_clusters;
select * from all_clusters;
select * from dba_clusters; -- requires DBA or SELECT_CATALOG_ROLE role

See message translations for ORA-00943 and search additional resources