How can I find out where a database table is being populated from?

database oracle triggers procedure
tamizboule picture tamizboule · May 18, 2010 · Viewed 11.6k times · Source

I'm in charge of an Oracle database for which we don't have any documentation. At the moment I need to know how a table is getting populated.

How can I find out which procedure, trigger, or other source, this table is getting its data from?

Answer

Guru picture Guru · May 18, 2010

Or even better, query the DBA_DEPENDENCIES table (or its equivalent USER_ ). You should see what objects are dependent on them and who owns them.

select owner, name, type, referenced_owner
from dba_dependencies
where referenced_name = 'YOUR_TABLE'

And yeah, you need to see through the objects to see whether there is an INSERT happening in.

Also this, from my comment above.

If it is not a production system, I would suggest you to raise an user defined exception in TRIGGER- before INSERT with some custom message or LOCK the table from INSERT and watch over the applications which try inserting into them failing. But yeah, you might also get calls from many angry people.

Related questions

How do I list all the columns in a table?

For the various popular database systems, how do you list all the columns in a table?

Read More
How to select the nth row in a SQL database table?

I'm interested in learning some (ideally) database agnostic ways of selecting the nth row from a database table. It would also be interesting to see how this can be achieved using the native functionality of the following databases: SQL Server …

Read More
How can I get column names from a table in Oracle?

I need to query the database to get the column names, not to be confused with data in the table. For example, if I have a table named EVENT_LOG that contains eventID, eventType, eventDesc, and eventTime, then I would …

Read More