Send email for each row in a result set - sql-server

I'd like to send an email for each row of a result set using sp_send_dbmail.
What is the appropriate way to accomplish this without using loops?
Edit: I'm not insisting a loop is not proper here, but is there a set based way to do this. I've tried creating a function, but a function cannot call a stored proc inside it. Only another func or extended sp (which I'd rather not do either).

This case is exactly what loops are good for (and designed for).
Since you do things that fall out of database scope, it's perfectly legitimate to use loops for them.
Databases are designed to store data and perform the queries against these data which return them in most handy way.
Relational databases can return data in form of rowsets.
Cursors (and loops that use them) are designed to keep a stable rowset so that some things with each of its rows can be done.
By "things" here I mean not pure database tricks, but real things that affect the outer world, the things the database is designed for, be it displaying a table on a webpage, generating a financial report or sending an email.
It's bad to use cursors for pure database tasks (like transforming one rowset to another), but it's perfectly nice to use them for the things like that one you described.
Set based methods are designed to work within a single transaction.
If your set-base query will fail for some reason, you database will revert to the state in was before, but you cannot "rollback" a sent email. You won't be able to keep track of your messages in case of an error.

It must be a row-by-row operation if you need an email per row. It's not a standard set based action.
Either you WHILE through it in SQL or you "for each" in a client language
I would not send emails from triggers BTW: your transaction is open while the trigger executes

Not the best practice but if you want to avoid loops:
You could create a "SendMails" table, with a trigger on Insert
The sp_send_dbmail is called from inside the trigger
then you do:
Truncate Table SendMails
insert into SendMails (From, To, Subject,text) Select field1,field2,field3,field4 from MyTable

Set up a data-driven subscription in SQL Server Reporting Services :-D
Sounds like an SSRS requirement to me - TSQL isn't really designed for reporting in and of itself.

The best way to accomplish this is to put your email sending logic in a user defined function.
Then you would simply call SELECT MyEmailFunc(emailaddress) FROM MyTable
It avoids loops and you can even use it in an update statement to show that the email was sent. For example:
UDPATE MyTable SET SENT = MyEmailFunc(emailaddress) WHERE sent = 0

Related

For Oracle Database How to find when the row was inserted? (timestamp) [duplicate]

Can I find out when the last INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE statement was performed on a table in an Oracle database and if so, how?
A little background: The Oracle version is 10g. I have a batch application that runs regularly, reads data from a single Oracle table and writes it into a file. I would like to skip this if the data hasn't changed since the last time the job ran.
The application is written in C++ and communicates with Oracle via OCI. It logs into Oracle with a "normal" user, so I can't use any special admin stuff.
Edit: Okay, "Special Admin Stuff" wasn't exactly a good description. What I mean is: I can't do anything besides SELECTing from tables and calling stored procedures. Changing anything about the database itself (like adding triggers), is sadly not an option if want to get it done before 2010.
I'm really late to this party but here's how I did it:
SELECT SCN_TO_TIMESTAMP(MAX(ora_rowscn)) from myTable;
It's close enough for my purposes.
Since you are on 10g, you could potentially use the ORA_ROWSCN pseudocolumn. That gives you an upper bound of the last SCN (system change number) that caused a change in the row. Since this is an increasing sequence, you could store off the maximum ORA_ROWSCN that you've seen and then look only for data with an SCN greater than that.
By default, ORA_ROWSCN is actually maintained at the block level, so a change to any row in a block will change the ORA_ROWSCN for all rows in the block. This is probably quite sufficient if the intention is to minimize the number of rows you process multiple times with no changes if we're talking about "normal" data access patterns. You can rebuild the table with ROWDEPENDENCIES which will cause the ORA_ROWSCN to be tracked at the row level, which gives you more granular information but requires a one-time effort to rebuild the table.
Another option would be to configure something like Change Data Capture (CDC) and to make your OCI application a subscriber to changes to the table, but that also requires a one-time effort to configure CDC.
Ask your DBA about auditing. He can start an audit with a simple command like :
AUDIT INSERT ON user.table
Then you can query the table USER_AUDIT_OBJECT to determine if there has been an insert on your table since the last export.
google for Oracle auditing for more info...
SELECT * FROM all_tab_modifications;
Could you run a checksum of some sort on the result and store that locally? Then when your application queries the database, you can compare its checksum and determine if you should import it?
It looks like you may be able to use the ORA_HASH function to accomplish this.
Update: Another good resource: 10g’s ORA_HASH function to determine if two Oracle tables’ data are equal
Oracle can watch tables for changes and when a change occurs can execute a callback function in PL/SQL or OCI. The callback gets an object that's a collection of tables which changed, and that has a collection of rowid which changed, and the type of action, Ins, upd, del.
So you don't even go to the table, you sit and wait to be called. You'll only go if there are changes to write.
It's called Database Change Notification. It's much simpler than CDC as Justin mentioned, but both require some fancy admin stuff. The good part is that neither of these require changes to the APPLICATION.
The caveat is that CDC is fine for high volume tables, DCN is not.
If the auditing is enabled on the server, just simply use
SELECT *
FROM ALL_TAB_MODIFICATIONS
WHERE TABLE_NAME IN ()
You would need to add a trigger on insert, update, delete that sets a value in another table to sysdate.
When you run application, it would read the value and save it somewhere so that the next time it is run it has a reference to compare.
Would you consider that "Special Admin Stuff"?
It would be better to describe what you're actually doing so you get clearer answers.
How long does the batch process take to write the file? It may be easiest to let it go ahead and then compare the file against a copy of the file from the previous run to see if they are identical.
If any one is still looking for an answer they can use Oracle Database Change Notification feature coming with Oracle 10g. It requires CHANGE NOTIFICATION system privilege. You can register listeners when to trigger a notification back to the application.
Please use the below statement
select * from all_objects ao where ao.OBJECT_TYPE = 'TABLE' and ao.OWNER = 'YOUR_SCHEMA_NAME'

Fire triggers on SELECT

I'm new to triggers and I need to fire a trigger when selecting values from a database table in sql server. I have tried firing triggers on insert/update and delete. is there any way to fire trigger when selecting values?
There are only two ways I know that you can do this and neither are trigger.
You can use a stored procedure to run the query and log the query to a table and other information you'd like to know.
You can use the audit feature of SQL Server.
I've never used the latter, so I can't speak of the ease of use.
No there is no provision of having trigger on SELECT operation. As suggested in earlier answer, write a stored procedure which takes parameters that are fetched from SEECT query and call this procedure after desired SELECT query.
SpectralGhost's answer assumes you are trying to do something like a security audit of who or what has looked at which data.
But it strikes me if you are new enough to sql not to know that a SELECT trigger is conceptually daft, you may be trying to do something else, in which case you're really talking about locking rather than auditing - i.e. once one process has read a particular record you want to prevent other processes accessing it (or possibly some other related records in a different table) until the transaction is either committed or rolled back. In that case, triggers are definitely not your solution (they rarely are). See BOL on transaction control and locking

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

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?
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.
It is quite simple ;-)
SELECT * FROM USER_SOURCE WHERE UPPER(TEXT) LIKE '%NAME_OF_YOUR_TABLE%';
In output you'll have all procedures, functions, and so on, that in ther body invoke your table called NAME_OF_YOUR_TABLE.
NAME_OF_YOUR_TABLE has to be written UPPERCASE because we are using UPPER(TEXT) in order to retrieve results as Name_Of_Your_Table, NAME_of_YOUR_table, NaMe_Of_YoUr_TaBlE, and so on.
Another thought is to try querying v$sql to find a statement that performs the update. You may get something from the module/action (or in 10g progam_id and program_line#).
DML changes are recorded in *_TAB_MODIFICATIONS.
Without creating triggers you can use LOG MINER to find all data changes and from which session.
With a trigger you can record SYS_CONTEXT variables into a table.
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14200/functions165.htm#SQLRF06117
Sounds like you want to audit.
How about
AUDIT ALL ON ::TABLE::;
Alternatively apply DBMS_FGA policy on the table and collect the client, program, user, and maybe the call stack would be available too.
Late to the party!
I second Gary's mention of v$sql also. That may yield the quick answer as long as the query hasn't been flushed.
If you know its in your current instance, I like a combination of what has been used above; if there is no dynamic SQL, xxx_Dependencies will work and work well.
Join that to xxx_Source to get that pesky dynamic SQL.
We are also bringing data into our dev instance using the SQL*Plus copy command (careful! deprecated!), but data can be introduced by imp or impdp as well. Check xxx_Directories for the directories blessed to bring data in/out.

What should be returned when inserting into SQL?

A few months back, I started using a CRUD script generator for SQL Server. The default insert statement that this generator produces, SELECTs the inserted row at the end of the stored procedure. It does the same for the UPDATE too.
The previous way (and the only other way I have seen online) is to just return the newly inserted Id back to the business object, and then have the business object update the Id of the record.
Having an extra SELECT is obviously an additional database call, and more data is being returned to the application. However, it allows additional flexibility within the stored procedure, and allows the application to reflect the actual data in the table.
The additional SELECT also increases the complexity when wanting to wrap the insert/update statements in a transaction.
I am wondering what people think is better way to do it, and I don't mean the implementation of either method. Just which is better, return just the Id, or return the whole row?
We always return the whole row on both an Insert and Update. We always want to make sure our client apps have a fresh copy of the row that was just inserted or updated. Since triggers and other processes might modify values in columns outside of the actual insert/update statement, and since the client usually needs the new primary key value (assuming it was auto generated), we've found it's best to return the whole row.
The select statement will have some sort of an advantage only if the data is generated in the procedure. Otherwise the data that you have inserted is generally available to you already so no point in selecting and returning again, IMHO. if its for the id then you can have it with SCOPE_IDENTITY(), that will return the last identity value created in the current session for the insert.
Based on my prior experience, my knee-jerk reaction is to just return the freshly generated identity value. Everything else the application is inserting, it already knows--names, dollars, whatever. But a few minutes reflection and reading the prior 6 (hmm, make that 5) replies, leads to a number of “it depends” situations:
At the most basic level, what you inserted is what you’d get – you pass in values, they get written to a row in the table, and you’re done.
Slightly more complex that that is when there are simple default values assigned during an insert statement. “DateCreated” columns that default to the current datetime, or “CreatedBy” that default to the current SQL login, are a prime example. I’d include identity columns here, since not every table will (or should) contain them. These values are generated by the database upon table insertion, so the calling application cannot know what they are. (It is not unknown for web server clocks to not be synchronized with database server clocks. Fun times…) If the application needs to know the values just generated, then yes, you’d need to pass those back.
And then there are are situations where additional processing is done within the database before data is inserted into the table. Such work might be done within stored procedures or triggers. Once again, if the application needs to know the results of such calculations, then the data would need to be returned.
With that said, it seems to me the main issue underlying your decision is: how much control/understanding do you have over the database? You say you are using a tool to automatically generate your CRUD procedures. Ok, that means that you do not have any elaborate processing going on within them, you’re just taking data and loading it on in. Next question: are there triggers (of any kind) present that might modify the data as it is being written to the tables? Extend that to: do you know whether or not such triggers exists? If they’re there and they matter, plan accordingly; if you do not or cannot know, then you might need to “follow up” on the insert to see if changes occurred. Lastly: does the application care? Does it need to be informed of the results of the insert action it just requested, and if so, how much does it need to know? (New identity value, date time it was added, whether or not something changed the Name from “Widget” to “Widget_201001270901”.)
If you have complete understanding and control over the system you are building, I would only put in as much as you need, as extra code that performs no useful function impacts performance and maintainability. On the flip side, if I were writing a tool to be used by others, I’d try to build something that did everything (so as to increase my market share). And if you are building code where you don't really know how and why it will be used (application purpose), or what it will in turn be working with (database design), then I guess you'd have to be paranoid and try to program for everything. (I strongly recommend not doing that. Pare down to do only what needs to be done.)
Quite often the database will have a property that gives you the ID of the last inserted item without having to do an additional select. For example, MS SQL Server has the ##Identity property (see here). You can pass this back to your application as an output parameter of your stored procedure and use it to update your data with the new ID. MySQL has something similar.
INSERT
INTO mytable (col1, col2)
OUTPUT INSERTED.*
VALUES ('value1', 'value2')
With this clause, returning the whole row does not require an extra SELECT and performance-wise is the same as returning only the id.
"Which is better" totally depends on your application needs. If you need the whole row, return the whole row, if you need only the id, return only the id.
You may add an extra setting to your business object which can trigger this option and return the whole row only if the object needs it:
IF #return_whole_row = 1
INSERT
INTO mytable (col1, col2)
OUTPUT INSERTED.*
VALUES ('value1', 'value2')
ELSE
INSERT
INTO mytable (col1, col2)
OUTPUT INSERTED.id
VALUES ('value1', 'value2')
FI
I don't think I would in general return an entire row, but it could be a useful technique.
If you are code-generating, you could generate two procs (one which calls the other, perhaps) or parametrize a single proc to determine whther to return it over the wire or not. I doubt the DB overhead is significant (single-row, got to have a PK lookup), but the data on the wire from DB to client could be significant when all added up and if it's just discarded in 99% of the cases, I see little value. Having an SP which returns different things with different parameters is a potential problem for clients, of course.
I can see where it would be useful if you have logic in triggers or calculated columns which are managed by the database, in which case, a SELECT is really the only way to get that data back without duplicating the logic in your client or the SP itself. Of course, the place to put any logic should be well thought out.
Putting ANY logic in the database is usually a carefully-thought-out tradeoff which starts with the minimally invasive and maximally useful things like constraints, unique constraints, referential integrity, etc and growing to the more invasive and marginally useful tools like triggers.
Typically, I like logic in the database when you have multi-modal access to the database itself, and you can't force people through your client assemblies, say. In this case, I would still try to force people through views or SPs which minimize the chance of errors, duplication, logic sync issues or misinterpretation of data, thereby providing as clean, consistent and coherent a perimeter as possible.

How to track data changes in a database table

What is the best way to track changes in a database table?
Imagine you got an application in which users (in the context of the application not DB users ) are able to change data which are store in some database table. What's the best way to track a history of all changes, so that you can show which user at what time change which data how?
In general, if your application is structured into layers, have the data access tier call a stored procedure on your database server to write a log of the database changes.
In languages that support such a thing aspect-oriented programming can be a good technique to use for this kind of application. Auditing database table changes is the kind of operation that you'll typically want to log for all operations, so AOP can work very nicely.
Bear in mind that logging database changes will create lots of data and will slow the system down. It may be sensible to use a message-queue solution and a separate database to perform the audit log, depending on the size of the application.
It's also perfectly feasible to use stored procedures to handle this, although there may be a bit of work involved passing user credentials through to the database itself.
You've got a few issues here that don't relate well to each other.
At the basic database level you can track changes by having a separate table that gets an entry added to it via triggers on INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE statements. Thats the general way of tracking changes to a database table.
The other thing you want is to know which user made the change. Generally your triggers wouldn't know this. I'm assuming that if you want to know which user changed a piece of data then its possible that multiple users could change the same data.
There is no right way to do this, you'll probably want to have a separate table that your application code will insert a record into whenever a user updates some data in the other table, including user, timestamp and id of the changed record.
Make sure to use a transaction so you don't end up with cases where update gets done without the insert, or if you do the opposite order you don't end up with insert without the update.
One method I've seen quite often is to have audit tables. Then you can show just what's changed, what's changed and what it changed from, or whatever you heart desires :) Then you could write up a trigger to do the actual logging. Not too painful if done properly...
No matter how you do it, though, it kind of depends on how your users connect to the database. Are they using a single application user via a security context within the app, are they connecting using their own accounts on the domain, or does the app just have everyone connecting with a generic sql-account?
If you aren't able to get the user info from the database connection, it's a little more of a pain. And then you might look at doing the logging within the app, so if you have a process called "CreateOrder" or whatever, you can log to the Order_Audit table or whatever.
Doing it all within the app opens yourself up a little more to changes made from outside of the app, but if you have multiple apps all using the same data and you just wanted to see what changes were made by yours, maybe that's what you wanted... <shrug>
Good luck to you, though!
--Kevin
In researching this same question, I found a discussion here very useful. It suggests having a parallel table set for tracking changes, where each change-tracking table has the same columns as what it's tracking, plus columns for who changed it, when, and if it's been deleted. (It should be possible to generate the schema for this more-or-less automatically by using a regexed-up version of your pre-existing scripts.)
Suppose I have a Person Table with 10 columns which include PersonSid and UpdateDate. Now, I want to keep track of any updates in Person Table.
Here is the simple technique I used:
Create a person_log table
create table person_log(date datetime2, sid int);
Create a trigger on Person table that will insert a row into person_log table whenever Person table gets updated:
create trigger tr on dbo.Person
for update
as
insert into person_log(date, sid) select updatedDTTM, PersonSID from inserted
After any updates, query person_log table and you will be able to see personSid that got updated.
Same you can do for Insert, delete.
Above example is for SQL, let me know in case of any queries or use this link :
https://web.archive.org/web/20211020134839/https://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/042507-1.shtml
A trace log in a separate table (with an ID column, possibly with timestamps)?
Are you going to want to undo the changes as well - perhaps pre-create the undo statement (a DELETE for every INSERT, an (un-) UPDATE for every normal UPDATE) and save that in the trace?
Let's try with this open source component:
https://tabledependency.codeplex.com/
TableDependency is a generic C# component used to receive notifications when the content of a specified database table change.
If all changes from php. You may use class to log evry INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE before query. It will be save action, table, column, newValue, oldValue, date, system(if need), ip, UserAgent, clumnReference, operatorReference, valueReference. All tables/columns/actions that need to log are configurable.

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