How to test a CONSTRAINT in oracle - sql

Question

I have the following constraint:
ALTER TABLE Movie
ADD CONSTRAINT NomsRANGE
CHECK (totalNoms BETWEEN 0 AND 20);
...and used the following to try and test it:
INSERT INTO Movie
(totalNoms)
VALUES
('23');
I get the following error:
cannot insert NULL into ("ALI"."MOVIE"."MOVIEID")
My scheme is:
Actor (actorID, lastName, firstName, middleName, suffix, gender, birthDate, deathDate)
Movie (movieID, title, year, company, totalNoms, awardsWon, DVDPrice, discountPrice)
Quote (quoteID, quote)
Role (roleID ,roleName ,gender ,actorID* ,movieID*)
RoleQuote (roleID*, quoteID*)
And my relationships are:
CONSTRAINT_NAME C
------------------------------ -
QUOTE_FK R
ROLE_FK R
MOVIE_ROLE_FK R
ACTOR_ROLE_FK R
ACTORID P
MOVIEID P
QUOTEID P
ROLEID P
ROLEQUOTEID P
9 rows selected.
Answer:
The answer was simple none of you spotted this it took me all day but i solved it so am posting solution so it helps others.
INSERT INTO Movie(movieID, totalNoms)
VALUES('049', '22');
I missed the first value which was the primary key as the error was saying:
cannot insert NULL into ("ALI"."MOVIE"."MOVIEID")
When i entered a new primary key it showed the constraint was violated
Thank you guys for all the help

Answer 1

If you omit columns in an INSERT statement, the database still needs to fill the column for that row. Which would be NULL, unless you setup a DEFAULT constraint/etc for each column.
The error is telling you that MOVIE.movieid does not accept NULL, which is good. It sounds like you need to setup the sequence to populate the value, or provide logic for however you want MOVIE.movieid populated (far less ideal). The sequence can either be referenced in the INSERT statement to fill the value, or you can look at triggers/default constraints to handle things in the background.
You'll have to figure out how you want/need to handle any other errors relating to column NULLability. Only after this is done, will you be able to see if your CHECK constraint works -- there's a little concern about if the value is provided as a string, if Oracle will implicitly convert it to an INT/NUMERIC data type.

Answer 2

1) The specific error is telling you that your INSERT statement needs to specify the MovieID. If you have created sequences to generate your synthetic primary key values, you'd want something like this (assuming there are no other NOT NULL columns in the Movie table)
INSERT INTO Movie
(movieID, totalNoms)
VALUES
(movieId_seq.nextval, 23);
2) Assuming that totalNoms is a NUMBER since your check constraint is treating it like a number, you would want to insert the number 23 rather than the string 23. Forcing Oracle to do implicit conversions is never a good idea-- it probably won't matter on a simple INSERT like this but if you get in the habit of using numbers when you're dealing with numeric fields and strings when you're dealing with character fields, life will be a lot easier.