How to reuse the Unused columns again in oracle DB

Question

I have a table with 4 column, ID, NAME,AGE and COUNTRY. For some time being purpose i have set my AGE column as unused by below command

alter table Personal set unused column AGE;

Now i want to use the same column AGE again, How to do this in Oracle(10g).

and dropping a column and setting a column to Unused which is best option. Pls guide me.

Answer 1

You cannot reuse a unused column. The only possible action on the column is to remove it from the table.

But you can add a new column with the same name, even without removing the unused column.

From the documentation

The ALTER TABLE...DROP UNUSED COLUMNS statement is the only action allowed on unused columns. It physically removes unused columns from the table and reclaims disk space.

In the ALTER TABLE statement that follows, the optional clause CHECKPOINT is specified. This clause causes a checkpoint to be applied after processing the specified number of rows, in this case 250. Checkpointing cuts down on the amount of undo logs accumulated during the drop column operation to avoid a potential exhaustion of undo space.

ALTER TABLE hr.admin_emp DROP UNUSED COLUMNS CHECKPOINT 250;

And this other (emphasis mine):

Marking Columns Unused

If you are concerned about the length of time it could take to drop column data from all of the rows in a large table, you can use the ALTER TABLE...SET UNUSED statement. This statement marks one or more columns as unused, but does not actually remove the target column data or restore the disk space occupied by these columns. However, a column that is marked as unused is not displayed in queries or data dictionary views, and its name is removed so that a new column can reuse that name. All constraints, indexes, and statistics defined on the column are also removed.