Thursday, November 27, 2008

ORA-00947: not enough values

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You may encounter the following exception:
ORA-00947: not enough values
when you attempt to compile a PL/SQL unit containing a FORALL construct in conjunction with a collection based on a record data type:
DECLARE
TYPE prf_runs_type IS TABLE OF plsql_profiler_runs%ROWTYPE;
rmt_runs_tab prf_runs_type;
...
BEGIN
...
FORALL i IN 1..rmt_runs_tab.COUNT
INSERT INTO plsql_profiler_runs
(runid, related_run, run_owner, run_date, run_comment, ..., spare1)
VALUES rmt_runs_tab(i);
...
END;
The problem with the FORALL statement above is in that i am specifying the list of fields to be inserted whereas the PL/SQL parser is expecting a simpler syntax:

FORALL i IN 1..rmt_runs_tab.COUNT
INSERT INTO plsql_profiler_runs
VALUES rmt_runs_tab(i);
Note that bulk operations involving record data types are perfectly legal, however i could not verify if this type of constructs is valid on Oracle versions prior to 10gR2.

ORA-00947 is also returned in trivial situations like INSERT statements containing an insufficient number of parameters in the VALUES clause or too few columns in a SELECT list as in these examples:

INSERT INTO plsql_profiler_runs
(runid, run_owner)
VALUES(1);

INSERT INTO plsql_profiler_runs
(runid, run_owner)
SELECT 1 FROM dual;

See message translations for ORA-00947 and search additional resources.

2 comments:

  1. The record based insert works with 9i.
    The trick to bypass the error is as follows:

    FORALL i IN 1..rmt_runs_tab.COUNT
    INSERT INTO
    (select runid, related_run, run_owner, run_date, run_comment, ..., spare1 from plsql_profiler_runs)
    VALUES rmt_runs_tab(i);

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hello Gary,
    thanks for the tip!

    I must say that the dml_table_expression_clause syntax looks really horrible to me ;-)

    Flavio

    ReplyDelete

I appreciate your comment however bear in mind that I might not have the time to reply soon.
Normally I do not reply to all comments but I am glad if you found something useful or if you learned something new, in that case I strongly encourage you to promote the article with the +1 google button.
Flavio