Get column names in subquery, and then return values for those columns? - sql

Question

Seems like this is impossible, but I'm so close - maybe someone can take me the last step...
I have a bunch of dynamic code and I don't always know the tables and columns I'm going to be dealing with, but I do know that VARCHAR2 columns with data_lengths of 2000 result in errors. I'd love to be able to identify these 'bad' columns dynamically, and remove them from my results in 1 shot.
This code:
SELECT LISTAGG(probs.column_name, ', ')
WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY column_name) FROM
(select 1 grp, column_name
from all_tab_columns
where TABLE_NAME = 'MYTABLE' AND
DATA_TYPE <> 'VARCHAR2' AND
DATA_LENGTH < 2000
) probs
GROUP BY GRP
Gives me a nice comma, separated list of all of my acceptable column names like this:
FIELD1, FIELD2, FIELD3, FIELD4...
And I am hopeful that there's a way a can simply do something to drop that list of field names into a select statement like this:
SELECT (<my subquery, above>)
FROM MYTABLE;
Is this possible?

Answer 1

Assuming this situation
create table mytable ( a number, b number, c number)
insert into mytable values (10, 20, 30)
insert into mytable values (1, 2, 3)
and that only exists one table with that name (otherwise you should specify the owner in the query from all_tab_columns), your query could be simplified this way:
SELECT 'select ' || LISTAGG(column_name, ', ') WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY column_name) || ' from ' || table_name
FROM all_tab_columns
WHERE TABLE_NAME = 'MYTABLE'
AND DATA_TYPE <> 'VARCHAR2'
AND DATA_LENGTH < 2000
GROUP BY table_name
this would give: select A, B, C from MYTABLE.
The problem here is that you can not simply run a statement that returns a variable number of columns; one way to use this could be building an xml:
SELECT xmltype(
DBMS_XMLGEN.getxml(
( SELECT 'select ' || LISTAGG(column_name, ', ') WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY column_name) || ' from ' || table_name
FROM all_tab_columns
WHERE TABLE_NAME = 'MYTABLE'
AND DATA_TYPE <> 'VARCHAR2'
AND DATA_LENGTH < 2000
GROUP BY table_name)
)
)
FROM DUAL
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ROWSET>
<ROW>
<A>10</A>
<B>20</B>
<C>30</C>
</ROW>
<ROW>
<A>1</A>
<B>2</B>
<C>3</C>
</ROW>
</ROWSET>
Another way could be using some PLSQL and dynamic SQL, with a little modification of yur query to concatenate the fields, to build the result in a unique string:
declare
type tTabResults is table of varchar2(1000);
vSQL varchar2(1000);
vTabResults tTabResults;
begin
SELECT 'select ' || LISTAGG( column_name, '|| '', '' ||') WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY column_name) || ' from ' || table_name
into vSQL
FROM all_tab_columns
WHERE TABLE_NAME = 'MYTABLE'
AND DATA_TYPE <> 'VARCHAR2'
AND DATA_LENGTH < 2000
GROUP BY table_name;
--
execute immediate vSQL bulk collect into vTabResults;
--
for i in vTabResults.first .. vTabResults.last loop
dbms_output.put_line(vTabResults(i));
end loop;
end;
10, 20, 30
1, 2, 3
Notice that I oversimplified the problem, treating numbers as strings and not using any conversion, by simply printing the values in your table, no matter their type; in a real solution you should handle the possible types of your columns and modify the initial query to add some type conversions.