Software Development

Awesome SQL Trick: Constraints on Views

CHECK constraints are already pretty great when you want to sanitize your data. But there are some limitations to CHECK constraints, including the fact that they are applied to the table itself, when sometimes, you want to specify constraints that only apply in certain situations.

This can be done with the SQL standard WITH CHECK OPTION clause, which is implemented by at least Oracle and SQL Server. Here’s how to do that:
 
 
 
 

CREATE TABLE books (
  id    NUMBER(10)         NOT NULL,
  title VARCHAR2(100 CHAR) NOT NULL,
  price NUMBER(10, 2)      NOT NULL,
  
  CONSTRAINT pk_book PRIMARY KEY (id)
);
/

CREATE VIEW expensive_books
AS
SELECT id, title, price
FROM books
WHERE price > 100
WITH CHECK OPTION;
/

INSERT INTO books 
VALUES (1, '1984', 35.90);

INSERT INTO books 
VALUES (
  2, 
  'The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything',
  999.90
);

As you can see, expensive_books are all those books whose price is more than 100.00. This view will only report the second book:

SELECT * FROM expensive_books;

The above query yields:

ID TITLE                                       PRICE
-- ----------------------------------------- -------
 2 The Answer to Life, the Universe, and ...   999.9

But now, that we have that CHECK OPTION, we can also prevent users from inserting “expensive books” that aren’t really expensive. For instance, let’s run this query:

INSERT INTO expensive_books 
VALUES (3, '10 Reasons why jOOQ is Awesome', 9.99);

This query won’t work now. We’re getting:

ORA-01402: view WITH CHECK OPTION where-clause violation

We also cannot update any of the “expensive books” to be non-expensive:

UPDATE expensive_books
SET price = 9.99;

This query results in the same ORA-01402 error message.

Inline WITH CHECK OPTION

In case you need to locally prevent bogus data from being inserted into a table, you can also use inline WITH CHECK OPTION clauses like so:

INSERT INTO (
  SELECT *
  FROM expensive_books
  WHERE price > 1000
  WITH CHECK OPTION
) really_expensive_books
VALUES (3, 'Modern Enterprise Software', 999.99);

And the above query again resutls in an ORA-01402 error.

Using SQL transformation to generate ad-hoc constraints

While CHECK OPTION is very useful for stored views, which can have proper grants for those users that may not access the underlying table directly, the inline CHECK OPTION is mainly useful when you transform dynamic SQL in an intermediate SQL transformation layer in your applciation.

This can be done with jOOQ’s SQL transformation capabilities, for instance, where you can watch out for a certain table in your SQL statements, and then centrally prevent bogus DML from being executed. This is a great way to implement multi-tenancy, if your database doesn’t natively support row-level security.

Stay tuned for a future blog post explaining how to transform your SQL with jOOQ to implement row-level security for any database.

Reference: Awesome SQL Trick: Constraints on Views from our JCG partner Lukas Eder at the JAVA, SQL, AND JOOQ blog.

Lukas Eder

Lukas is a Java and SQL enthusiast developer. He created the Data Geekery GmbH. He is the creator of jOOQ, a comprehensive SQL library for Java, and he is blogging mostly about these three topics: Java, SQL and jOOQ.
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