topic Deleting Primary Key fields in Application Development and Automation Discussions

Deleting Primary Key fields

Former Member — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 14:21:35 GMT

Can we delete Primary Key fields of a transparent table which is already having the data in Production Server?

If Yes, could you help me out with the procedure

Re: Deleting Primary Key fields

Former Member — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 14:24:56 GMT

You can not do it in Production directly, rather u need to do in development server and transport , transport request to production.

once transport request is in production, run SE14 to adjust the database table.

Re: Deleting Primary Key fields

ThomasZloch — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 14:32:00 GMT

Deleting primary key fields will most likely lead to duplicate keys, so you will lose data when adjusting the table as suggested above.

Make sure you know what you are doing, search for additional information and documentation.

Thomas

Re: Deleting Primary Key fields

Former Member — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 06:20:08 GMT

Hi,

Yes you can delete pk's but one pk is mandatory and after deleting the pk u can adjust the table in tcode : SE14 without lose of data/records.

Regards

Mahesh

Re: Deleting Primary Key fields

pankaj_sandanshi — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 11:36:20 GMT

Hi,

Yes you can delete the primary key of a transparent table but you should not do it in production server

because once you delete the primary key field, system will ask you to activate and adjust the table again, you can do it through SE14 tcode by selecting activate and adjuct option, but there are chnces

of table data might be deleted.

Regards

Pankaj

Re: Deleting Primary Key fields

Former Member — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 10:38:59 GMT

Hi Kalyan,

The Primary key field can be removed , also the primary key field can be deleted irrespective of the table being present in Production / Dev server.

Since, the transparent table is present in Production, it can be risky do make any major changes without proper approvals.

Please make sure to make adjustments in Table definition from Database Utility.

Utilities - > Database Object -> Database Utility

Regards

Vivek Batta

Re: Deleting Primary Key fields

Former Member — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 13:29:39 GMT

you cannot delete primary key fields of table which have data. create another table in dev, and move to production and copy data...and then delete table. Note: table name should update all objects which have used this table.

Re: Deleting Primary Key fields

Former Member — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 14:35:52 GMT

The way suggested above .... is a good procedure one should follow ( especially in Dev / Prod ) server.

However, I once tried deleting the primary key field in sandbox server and was able to keep the data intact after deleting the primary key field. After making the changes, the DB structure was adjusted using DB utility

I feel, there might be a difference in how we approach the scenario here.

Re: Deleting Primary Key fields

ThomasZloch — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 20:31:10 GMT

In your example, you did not lose data because the combined values in the remaining primary key fields were still unique. Suppose you remove FATHER_NAME as well, then you would lose one of the two EID = "2" / ACC_NO = "112" rows after adjusting the table.

Thomas