ORA-00001 Unique constraint violated

January 30th, 2009 Posted in Oracle Tip

I am going to start posting information on common Oracle errors. These are error I see all the time in my daily work or errors I see from other’s working on my databases.

Th first error I see a lot is “ORA-00001 Unique constraint violated”. This error means that an attempt has been made to insert a record with a duplicate (unique) key. This error will also be generated if an existing record is updated to generate a duplicate (unique) key. Typically this is a duplicate primary key, but it need not be the primary key. On our data warehouse I see this error several times a day. Primary keys and unique constraints help keep the data clean.

You really only have a few option when dealing with this error:

  1. Remove the unique restriction.
  2. Change the restriction to allow duplicate keys. An index could be changed to be a non-unique index, but remember that the primary key must always be unique
  3. Do not insert the duplicate key
Tags: ,
This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Oracle Tip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a Reply