oracle table creation - sql

Question

The following code gives me ERROR at line 3: ORA-00907: missing right parenthesis:
CREATE TABLE ORGANISATION(
ORG_REF VARCHAR(5),
POSTCODE VARCHAR(10) FOREIGN KEY,
TELEPHONE NUMBER FOREIGN KEY,
DESCRIPTION VARCHAR(30),
AGENCY_ID VARCHAR(5));
Line 3 code is very annoying because looking at the line there are no spelling mistakes and everything is in the right place.

Answer 1

That's not how you define a foreign key. A foreign key must know how to find it's partner.
Read here: http://www.techonthenet.com/oracle/foreign_keys/foreign_keys.php
Foreign key definition goes something like this:
CREATE TABLE ORGANISATION(
ORG_REF VARCHAR(5),
POSTCODE VARCHAR(10), --THIS WILL BE FOREIGN KEY
TELEPHONE NUMBER, --2nd FOREIGN KEY
DESCRIPTION VARCHAR(30),
AGENCY_ID VARCHAR(5),
FOREIGN KEY FK_POSTCODE
REFERENCES other_table (post_code),
FOREIGN KEY FK_TELEPHONE
REFERENCES other_table2 (phone)
);
UPDATE:
Additional Recommended Reading: http://mattgemmell.com/2008/12/08/what-have-you-tried/

Answer 2

Where to start?
You should be using varchar2 not varchar. Although they're currently identical the future behaviour of varchar is not guaranteed
Telephone number as a numeric field? A lot of phone numbers start with a 0. You're losing this. If you ever want to display it nicely you have to do some funky string manipulation on exit.
If your IDs are numbers then you should store them as a number.
There is rarely a situation where a table should not have a primary key.
A foreign key is designed to enforce referential integrity in the database. There should therefore be one or two more tables in this schema as a minimum.
A typical situation might be like this, which assumes that the same postcode,phone combination exists in agency.
CREATE TABLE ORGANISATION(
ORG_REF VARCHAR2(5),
POSTCODE VARCHAR2(10) ,
TELEPHONE VARCHAR2(50),
DESCRIPTION VARCHAR(30),
AGENCY_ID VARCHAR(5),
CONSTRAINT PK_ORGANISATION PRIMARY KEY ( org_ref ),
CONSTRAINT FX_ORGANISATION FOREIGN KEY
REFERENCES SOME_OTHER_TABLE(POSTCODE,PHONE)
);
If it were just a single column and not 2 you could reference it inline, something like the following:
create table organisation (
org_ref number(16) not null
, phone varchar2(5) not null constraint fk_organisation
references agency ( phone )
, constraint pk_organisation primary key ( org_ref )
);
However, I doubt very much that this'll work. A foreign key must reference a unique constraint. So, judging by your comments you must have a table agency with a unique constraint or primary key on phone, postcode.
I suspect your data-model is flawed; it sounds as though organisation inherits from agency.
I would remove the phone and postcode from agency and just do a join to get that information, if you're currently looking at the agency table:
select a.*, o.postcode, o.phone
from agency a
join organisation o
on a.agency_id = o.agency_id
where a.id = 12345
Further reading:
Examples
Documentation

Answer 3

CREATE TABLE ORGANISATION(
ORG_REF VARCHAR(5),
POSTCODE VARCHAR(10),
TELEPHONE NUMBER,
DESCRIPTION VARCHAR(30),
AGENCY_ID VARCHAR(5),
constraint pcodefk foreign key(POSTCODE) references postalcodetable(POSTALCODE),
constraint telefk foreign key(TELEPHONE) references telephonenumbers(TELEPHONE));