[sql] Change Primary Key

I have a table in Oracle which has following schema:

City_ID  Name  State  Country  BuildTime  Time

When I declared the table my primary key was both City_ID and the BuildTime, but now I want to change the primary key to three columns:

City_ID  BuildTime  Time

How can I change the primary key?

You will need to drop and re-create the primary key like this:

alter table my_table drop constraint my_pk;
alter table my_table add constraint my_pk primary key (city_id, buildtime, time);

However, if there are other tables with foreign keys that reference this primary key, then you will need to drop those first, do the above, and then re-create the foreign keys with the new column list.

An alternative syntax to drop the existing primary key (e.g. if you don't know the constraint name):

alter table my_table drop primary key;

Assuming that your table name is city and your existing Primary Key is pk_city, you should be able to do the following:

ALTER TABLE city
DROP CONSTRAINT pk_city;

ALTER TABLE city
ADD CONSTRAINT pk_city PRIMARY KEY (city_id, buildtime, time);

Make sure that there are no records where time is NULL, otherwise you won't be able to re-create the constraint.

Sometimes when we do these steps:

 alter table my_table drop constraint my_pk; 
 alter table my_table add constraint my_pk primary key (city_id, buildtime, time);

The last statement fails with

ORA-00955 "name is already used by an existing object"

Oracle usually creates an unique index with the same name my_pk. In such a case you can drop the unique index or rename it based on whether the constraint is still relevant.

You can combine the dropping of primary key constraint and unique index into a single sql statement:

alter table my_table drop constraint my_pk drop index; 

check this: ORA-00955 "name is already used by an existing object"