Pickleball spielen

If you want to batch-process over a number of objects in Exasol, scripts that work with the Data Dictionary might do the trick. Let’s say I want to drop all of my tables that start with the letter P:

SQL_EXA> open schema fred;
EXA: open schema fred;

Rows affected: 0

SQL_EXA> create or replace script droptables
          as
          res=query([[select * from exa_user_tables where table_name like 'P%']])
          for i=1, #res
          do
           query([[drop table ::t]],{t=res[i].TABLE_NAME})
          end
        /
EXA: create or replace script droptables...

Rows affected: 0

SQL_EXA> select table_name from exa_user_tables;
EXA: select table_name from exa_user_tables;

TABLE_NAME
--------------------------------------------------
P9_TAB
P8_TAB

2 rows in resultset.

Amazingly enough, DROP TABLE is an operation that can be rolled back in Exasol. So to safeguard, I can disable autocommit here.

SQL_EXA> set autocommit off;
SQL_EXA> execute script droptables;
EXA: execute script droptables;

Rows affected: 0

SQL_EXA> select table_name from exa_user_tables;
EXA: select table_name from exa_user_tables;

TABLE_NAME
--------------------------------------------------

0 rows in resultset.

SQL_EXA> rollback;
EXA: rollback;

Rows affected: 0

SQL_EXA> select table_name from exa_user_tables;
EXA: select table_name from exa_user_tables;

TABLE_NAME
---------------------------------------------------
P9_TAB
P8_TAB

2 rows in resultset.