Oracle Database 10g The Complete Reference

CHAPTER 15Changing Data: insert, update, merge, and delete

Until now, virtually everything you’ve learned about Oracle, SQL, and SQL*Plus has related to selecting data from tables in the database. This chapter shows how to change the data in a table—how to insert new rows, update the values of columns in rows, and delete rows entirely. Although these topics have not been covered explicitly, nearly everything you already know about SQL, including datatypes, calculations, string formatting, where clauses, and the like, can be used here, so there really isn’t much new to learn. Oracle gives you a transparent, distributed database capability that inserts, updates, and deletes data in remote databases as well (see Chapter 23). As you’ll see in this ...