Re: Do you use PL/SQL

From: DA Morgan <damorgan_at_psoug.org>
Date: Tue, 22 May 2007 13:05:34 -0700
Message-ID: <46534D0E.1020505@psoug.org>

Comments in-line.

Doug Davis wrote:

> On May 20, 1:18 pm, DA Morgan <damor..._at_psoug.org> wrote:
> 

>> I authored and teach the Oracle program at the University of Washington
>> and I must agree with Frank van Bortel when he questions your
>> qualification to teach the class. And my apology if the following seems
>> a bit cruel... it isn't intended to be such.
>>
>> Several years ago I brought in a PhD Java programmer who was one of the
>> authors of the Hibernate framework to teach one quarter with me. Truly
>> a Java genius. But my students knew more about databases than he did and
>> while they learned a lot of Java they class evaluation form after the
>> quarter was brutal.

>
> i'm not him. :-)

 >

>> Let me give you a short self-test to consider before you teach it.
>> 1. When is it appropriate to commit inside of a loop?
>
> If a procedure is meant to be atomic, that wouldn't make any sense.

Your response misses the entire point of the question. The point of the question is ORA-01555.

>> 2. When is it appropriate in 9i or 10g to use a cursor loop?
>
> Do you mean regarding problems with locks and such?

No. The question has nothing to do with locks. The point of the question was avoiding single row processing which is extremely inefficient.

>> 3. When should production code be deployed with stand-alone functions
>> and procedures?

> 
> Isn't this an issue that any software engineer would know about - the
> advantages of separate namespaces and information hiding? What's new
> here?

What's new is that you didn't, it appears, understand the question which has nothing to do with namespaces and hiding information. The point of the question was the advantages of placing code into packages which include:

• All related code in a single object
• All related code loaded into memory simultaneously
• Session global variables and types
• Single object compilation
• Variables persist for term of session
• Initialization section
• Overloading
• Fewer objects to manage and grant/revoke privileges

It is not my intent to be condescending but I would recommend that you retain the services of a good development DBA to co-teach the class with you.

-- 
Daniel A. Morgan
University of Washington
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)
Puget Sound Oracle Users Group
www.psoug.org

Received on Tue May 22 2007 - 15:05:34 CDT