Handling unique constraint violations by Hibernate

A particular table in our system is a M:M link table between Bonds and Payments, imaginatively named BOND_PAYMENTS; and to make the Java devs’ jobs easier it has a surrogate key, BOND_PAYMENT_ID. Its structure, therefore, is basically:

BOND_PAYMENTS
  (BOND_PAYMENT_ID,
   BOND_NUMBER,
   PAYMENT_ID)

This is a very simple design, quite common in relational database designs. There is a Primary key constraint on BOND_PAYMENT_ID, and we’ve also added a Unique constraint on (BOND_NUMBER, PAYMENT_ID) since it makes no sense to have more than one link between a Bond and a Payment.

The application allows a user to view all the Payments linked to a particular Bond; and it allows them to create new links, and delete existing links. Once they’ve made all their desired changes on the page, they hit “Save”, and Hibernate does its magic to run the required SQL on the database. Unfortunately, this was failing with ORA-00001: unique constraint violated.

Now, the way this page works is that it compares the old set of payments for the bond with the new target set, and Hibernate works out which records need to be deleted, which need to be inserted, and leaves the rest untouched. Unfortunately, in its infinite wisdom it does the INSERTs first, then it does the DELETEs. Apparently this order can’t be changed.

This is the cause of the unique constraint violation – if the user deletes a link to a payment, then changes their mind and re-inserts a link to the same payment, Hibernate quite happily tries to insert it then delete it. Since these inserts/deletes are running as separate SQL statements, Oracle validates the constraint immediately on the first insert.

We had only a few options:

  1. Make the constraint deferrable
  2. Remove the unique constraint

Option 2 was not very palatable, because the constraint provides excellent protection from nasty application bugs that might allow inconsistent data to be saved. We went with option 1.

ALTER TABLE bond_payments ADD
  CONSTRAINT bond_payment_uk UNIQUE (bond_number, payment_id)
  DEFERRABLE INITIALLY DEFERRED;

This solved it – and no changes required to the application. If a bug in the application were to cause it to try to insert a duplicate row, it will fail with ORA-02091 (transaction rolled back) and ORA-00001 (unique constraint violated) when the session COMMITs.

The only downside is that the index created to police this constraint is now a non-unique index, so may be somewhat less efficient for queries. We decided this is not as great a detriment for this particular case.

If you know of any other options that we should have considered, let me know 🙂


Data dictionary quiz question

This is a totally unfair quiz question (for anyone who isn’t intimately acquainted with the Oracle data dictionary views). There, I’ve warned you. I would have got this one wrong, myself.

Which of the following queries (if any) will run without error?

SELECT * FROM dba_tab_privs WHERE owner = 'SCOTT';
SELECT * FROM all_tab_privs WHERE owner = 'SCOTT';
SELECT * FROM user_tab_privs WHERE owner = 'SCOTT';

Now, don’t go and try running these in your database until after you’ve written down what you think the answers are. That would be cheating 🙂

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EDIT

Ok, now to break the suspense for all the other readers (both of you), who couldn’t be bothered testing it out for yourself.

Statement 1. The query on DBA_TAB_PRIVS will succeed – assuming you have the necessary privileges on the DBA* views. This view does include the column OWNER.

Statement 3. The query on USER_TAB_PRIVS, unlike what I and several others might assume,  will succeed.  Many data dictionary views, such as USER_TABLES, omit the OWNER column – which makes sense, since it is expected that it will be simply the currently-logged-in user. But for user_tab_privs, this column is provided, for good reason – because the table you have a privilege on may very well be owned by another schema.

Statement 2. The query on ALL_TAB_PRIVS, in order to be consistent with DBA_TAB_PRIVS and USER_TAB_PRIVS, should have the OWNER column, by rights. But, just to make things interesting, the column is called TABLE_SCHEMA instead. So, my query would fail.


APEX Tip: How to fix the Date Picker icon position

I was playing around with the layout of my APEX form, while at the same time upgrading the date items from the Classic date items to the new Date Picker items, and was rewarded with this:

The simplest way to fix this is to edit the Item, specifically the HTML Table Cell Attributes – set to NOWRAP:

Viola, problem solved:

June 2016: Update for APEX 5 Universal Theme

I was alerted by  that the above solution does not work with the Universal Theme in APEX 5.

datepickerwrap

I had a go at trying to workaround it. I tried adding “white-space:nowrap” to various levels of divs around the item, which stopped it from wrapping the icon, but it kept hiding the icon behind the label div for the next item.

So through the magic of twitter we got a CSS solution proposed by :

.t-Form-inputContainer { white-space: nowrap; }
.ui-datepicker-trigger { right: 25px; }

datepickernowrap

This takes care of the wrapping, and fixes the problem with the icon being hidden. The only downside is that when the screen is very slim, this css causes a gap to be shown on the right-hand side of the icon; this is not too big a deal but I suspect with the right media query syntax that could be fixed as well.

datepickerslim