That's an interesting question. How about letting us know if you find
an answer. I have a few cases where it would be useful to manipulate
the fields of :new and :old without hardcoding the field names.

Beth

-----Original Message-----
From: Joehnk, John [mailto:john.[Email Address Removed]
Sent: Monday, June 30, 2003 10:54 AM
To: LazyDBA.com Discussion
Subject: Trigger question for record update


Running Oracle 7.3.4 and have an application (not written in house) that
allows a person to go into an update screen, unfortunately it seems as
if even if the person makes no changes, if they do not back out, it
writes - or updates - the record even if there were no changes.

We wanted to create a history of changes so I created a trigger where
after the update of a record, the old values were written to the history
table.

Out history is now full of record that did not really change.

How could I check to see if the record REALLY changed to determine if I
need to write the record to the history table.

the table has 133 columns, so checking each one is possible, but I was
hoping for some way to check the entire record without going column by
column.

Any thoughts?

Thank You

John Joehnk
Scroll Technologies
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