Why doesn't Oracle tell you WHICH table or vie

Question

If you've used Oracle, you've probably gotten the helpful message "ORA-00942: Table or view does not exist". Is there a legitimate technical reason the message doesn't include the name of the missing object?

Arguments about this being due to security sound like they were crafted by the TSA. If I'm an attacker, I'd know what table I just attempted to exploit, and be able to interpret this unhelpful message easily. If I'm a developer working with a complex join through several layers of application code, it's often very difficult to tell.

My guess is that when this error was originally implemented, someone neglected to add the object name, and now, people are afraid it will break compatibility to fix it. (Code doing silly things like parsing the error message will be confused if it changes.)

Is there a developer-friendly (as opposed to recruiting your DBA) way to determine the name of the missing table?

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Although I've accepted an answer which is relevant to the topic, it doesn't really answer my question: Why isn't the name part of the error message? If anyone can come up with the real answer, I'll be happy to change my vote.

Answer 1

@Matthew

Your query's a start, but it might not work when you have multiple schemas. For example, if I log into our instance as myself, I have read access to all our tables. But if I don't qualify the table name with the schema I'll get an ORA-00942 for tables without synonyms:

SQL> select * from tools; 
select * from tools 
              * 
ERROR at line 1: 
ORA-00942: table or view does not exist 

The table still shows up in all_tables though:

SQL> select owner, table_name from all_tables where table_name = 'TOOLS'; 

OWNER                          TABLE_NAME 
------------------------------ ------------------------------ 
APPLICATION                    TOOLS 

@erikson Sorry that doesn't help much. I'm with Mark - I used TOAD.

Answer 2

I would disagree with the opinion, that SQL+ lets you understand which table name is unacceptable. True, it helps in direct DML, although parsing it is very hard. But when it comes to dynamic, we get no help:

SQL> begin
  2  execute immediate 'insert into blabla values(1)';
  3  end;
  4  /
begin
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-00942: table or view does not exist
ORA-06512: at line 2