I've just wasted the past two hours of my life trying to create a table with an auto incrementing primary key bases on this tutorial, The tutorial is great the issue I've been encountering is that the Create Target fails if I have a column which is a timestamp and a table that is called timestamp in the same table...

Why doesn't oracle flag this as being an issue when I create the table?

Here is the Sequence of commands I enter:

1. Creating the Table:

   CREATE TABLE myTable (id NUMBER PRIMARY KEY, field1 TIMESTAMP(6), timeStamp NUMBER,

);

1. Creating the Sequence:

   CREATE SEQUENCE test_sequence START WITH 1 INCREMENT BY 1;

2. Creating the trigger:

   CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER test_trigger BEFORE INSERT ON myTable REFERENCING NEW AS NEW FOR EACH ROW BEGIN SELECT test_sequence.nextval INTO :NEW.ID FROM dual; END; /

Here is the error message I get:

ORA-06552: PL/SQL: Compilation unit analysis terminated
ORA-06553: PLS-320: the declaration of the type of this expression is incomplete or malformed

Any combination that does not have the two lines with a the word "timestamp" in them works fine. I would have thought the syntax would be enough to differentiate between the keyword and a column name.

As I've said I don't understand why the table is created fine but oracle falls over when I try to create the trigger...

CLARIFICATION

I know that the issue is that there is a column called timestamp which may or may not be a keyword. MY issue is why it barfed when I tried to create a trigger and not when I created the table, I would have at least expected a warning.

That said having used Oracle for a few hours, it seems a lot less verbose in it's error reporting, Maybe just because I'm using the express version though.

If this is a bug in Oracle how would one who doesn't have a support contract go about reporting it? I'm just playing around with the express version because I have to migrate some code from MySQL to Oracle.