Imp-ish behavior :)

I have a question for the collective wisdom of the list. It's not hugely important but it's one of those things that can keep one awake at night, wondering...

I imp-orted a dump today, going from one copy of 8.1.7.4 to another. I received "name already used by an existing constraint" on foreign key constraints on two different tables, something that has never happened to me before. It was true that the two constraint names were already in use; they were each assigned to a not null constraint for the primary keys for two completely unrelated tables. No problem there, I was able to create the constraints by hand, but in the process of figuring out what had happened I noticed something interesting.

Each of the ALTER TABLE statements in the dump file specifies a name for the foreign key constraint it is creating. But none of the ones that were created successfully are actually using the specified names. For example, the other foreign key constraint on one of the tables I had trouble with is called SYS_C003672 in the dump file, but in the schema where I loaded this dump, it's called SYS_C004360. In other words, imp didn't actually use the name that was specified in the dump file; it used it's own autogenerated name. So why does it care whether the specified name is in use or not???

janine

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