Oracle: excluding updates of one column for firing a trigger

Question

In oracle I can specify the columns, which should induce a firing of a trigger:

create or replace trigger my_trigger
before update of col1, col2, col3 on my_         


        

Answer 1

It's probably not the answer you want to hear, but I think you are rather over-exaggerating the burden of maintenance. It is not normal for a table's structure to change very often after it goes into production. If you do have a table which is subject to frequent changes of column number or name, then I would suggest you have a bigger, architectural problem.

So, just type out all the column names now, and wait to see whether maintanance becomes an issue. It is certainly not worth coding a complicated implementation in a trigger - a tax which you will pay on every single update - in order to avoid an occasional changes to the DDL script.