Oracle and The CFDBINFO tag: More Tables Than I Bargained For
I was trying out the ColdFusion 8 <cfdbinfo> tag for the first time today, attempting to retrieve the names of all of the tables in a particular Oracle datasource. I used a <cfdump> to return the results, and I was startled to see a query object containing over 2,000 records.
A bit more than the 35 records I was expecting.
All of the unexpected entries were system tables or views. I have no idea what purpose they serve or if they're even part of the datasource per se.
It's possible it's an anomaly resulting from the way our DBAs have our Oracle server configured, rather than something that will affect anyone trying to use the <cfdbinfo> tag against an Oracle database, but I thought it worth sharing.
Fortunately, I should be able to use the "pattern" attribute of <cfdbinfo> to retrieve just the tables I need for my purpose.
I agree then that the tag needs enhancement for use with Oracle, but because so few ColdFusion shops use Oracle as their database (at least that's my perception) I don't know what kind of priority that kind of fix would get.
I was able to still use the tag for my particular need, though: most of my tables include the name or acronym of the app as the prefix of the table name, so using the pattern attribute with the wildcard characters worked out just fine, returning only the tables I needed fairly quickly.
My only gripe with the pattern attribute was there's no way to escape the wildcards, and I did sometimes use the underscore character (one of the wildcards) in my older table names.