How to prevent column b containing the same value as any column a in Oracle?

Posted by Janek Bogucki on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Janek Bogucki
Published on 2010-04-23T15:56:06Z Indexed on 2010/04/23 17:43 UTC
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What is a good way to prevent a table with 2 columns, a and b, from having any record where column b is equal to any value in column a? This would be used for a table of corrections like this,

MR   -> Mr
Prf. -> Prof.
MRs  -> Mrs

I can see how it could be done with a trigger and a subquery assuming no concurrent activity but a more declarative approach would be preferable.

This is an example of what should be prevented,

Wing Commdr. -> Wing Cdr.
Wing Cdr.    -> Wing Commander

Ideally the solution would work with concurrent inserts and updates.

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