No other way than by name, AFAIK, in Oracle.
Unless you use some handy client tool like TOAD, that is, where you can easily see the constraint text in the "Constraints" tab of the right-hand pane in the schema browser; then you can administer them from there and pretty much disregard the system-assigned constraint names in the left-most column... But it's there nonetheless, and AFAICS it has to be what TOAD uses, "behind the scene"(*), to do the same thing you used to do manually.
Also, if you only ever change your tables by dropping and re-creating them, then you can of course just alter the (anonymous) table-creation script you've saved somewhere and re-run it. This is where the copy-alter-restore technique comes in handy: "CREATE TABLE MY_TABLE_TEMP AS SELECT * FROM MY_TABLE; <<run your table-creation script (drop MY_TABLE first, if that isn't in the script)>> INSERT INTO MY_TABLE (SELECT * FROM MY_TABLE_TEMP); DROP TABLE MY_TABLE_TEMP;". That's actually how I often do it on development boxes, when I don't have TOAD available; unless the structure has changed too much in terms of added / dropped / renamed columns, that is... But for stuff like check constraints, it works fine.
But, apart from these "special cases" / personal technique preferences / workarounds, the general rule of thumb is, YES, you *should* name everything, including constraints.
HTH!
[link|mailto:MyUserId@MyISP.CountryCode|Christian R. Conrad]
(I live in Finland, and my e-mail in-box is at the Saunalahti company.)
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(*): Or is that "behind the scenes", plural? I think that's the form I've seen most often... But it doesn't really make any sense! Neither does the whole idea of using the word "scene" in this expression, BTW -- unless you realise that this is a remnant of an older usage, showing that in English too, as is still the case in many other languages, "scene" once used to mean not *what* you stage on a stage, but the stage you stage it *on*! (cf Fr. "scène", Ger. "Szene", and Swe. "scen", which all mean what modern English calls a "stage".) Anyway, if you see the expression as originally a theatrical analogy, then it really only makes sense to talk about one single scene (="stage") at a time; what is meant is the back-stage machinery of changing backdrops, "deus ex machina" appearances, etc, for ONE play -- NOT some plural-stage thing... What would a three-ring-circus have to do with anything?!?