Thursday, July 30, 2015

PL/SQL: The Good Parts

Somewhat inspired by Douglas Crockford's Javascript: The Good Parts presentation (and book), I have created a presentation called PL/SQL: The Good Parts.

This is not intended as an introduction to PL/SQL, but rather an overview of features you should consider if you want to maximize your enjoyment of programming in the Oracle Database. Also, this is not an exhaustive list of all features, it's simply the ones I personally use frequently.



Note that unlike Javascript, I don't consider PL/SQL to have too many "bad parts" or bizarre quirks. There's a lot of good stuff, hence the title! :-)

Click here to view the presentation.



3 comments:

Connor McDonald said...

Love it !

Unknown said...

Good Presentation, right to the point.
I suggest you take a look at Formspider, a framework for Web Application Development with PL/SQL. www.theformspider.com
Regards.-

Stew Ashton said...

Morten,

I consider this a truly outstanding presentation. I would add in the limitations: no FINALLY clause.

Possibly in the BAD part: more bad development practices. You cover some very important ones but the reader doesn't necessarily realize the subject is now him/her, not the language.

Personally, I would add a section about calling PL/SQL from outside the database. This is the part that receives less attention even from world-class experts such as yourself. At the least, mention "statement level atomicity" and how it can be broken by swallowing exceptions or coding explicit COMMIT / ROLLBACK. Ah, more bad practices...

It's interesting how many of the bad practices (row by row) are the same in PL/SQL and in other languages that call Oracle.

Best regards, Stew Ashton