So, I decided to read the Chrome comic book, which was sent out to a select few influencers prior to the launch last week.
I wanted to see what all the fuss is about, and a couple things intrigued me. First, since Chrome is Windows only, it must be pretty good to stay relevant in an [...]
Today has been a bit of a rare day…
I hurt my back last night at Karate. I managed to get in on a cancellation at my osteopath, so off I went this morning to get everything straightened out.
I left the osteopath just in time to get to the Prometric test center down the road to [...]
One of the good things about being off work is you get to go to the cinema during the day when it is practically empty and only costs £3.45 to see a film. I didn’t really fancy Bangkok Dangerous, mostly because of Nicolas Cage. I read a review of a film of his some years [...]
Wordpress 2.6.2 is out now. Get upgrading…
Cheers
Tim…
There’s been a few announcements recently that the upcoming version of SQL Developer will include database table modelling features. It seems to be a little know fact outside of JDeveloper circles that JDeveloper has had “offline” table modelling for sometime. The 11g release has expanded upon this feature set to include more options, that in turn make it (more of) a viable option to replace Oracle Designer physical database modelling.
(I suspect the upcoming SQL Dev modelling features just come from JDev anyhow, but I can’t confirm this).
In particular in the 11g release we now see that offline database objects have support for normal tables, external tables, index organised tables, temp tables and so on through the radio group at the top of the screen:
In addition for normal tables when selecting the Storage Options button under the Table Properties subnode, we now have the full gamut of storage clause options for the table we’re creating:
I know of a few Oracle sites that are holding onto Oracle Designer purely for its physical database modelling features only. Through the latest release of JDeveloper we can see there is the potential to drop Designer all together and go for the free JDeveloper. Now only if those sites could drop Oracle Forms too 
I need to write a procedure to process multiple rows of data from a table, and each time I call the procedure, the WHERE clause may change. I would like to use EXECUTE IMMEDIATE, but that lets me return only a single row of data. How can I avoid the nightmare of maintaining code in multiple procedures that is completely identical except for the WHERE clause?
I maintain a large application implemented in PL/SQL. Lately, a number of enhancements have required changes to the signatures of several procedures and functions. I have had to add new parameters and remove others. This has led to the need to change many other programs that call these units. How can I minimize the ripple effect of changes such as these?
I was taught that it is a bad practice to put application source code inside an exception handler. We should be able to remove all our exception sections, and—assuming no errors—our code should work the same. But I’ve run into lots of situations where I execute a SELECT INTO (an implicit one-row query), expecting it to return no rows (in other words, that’s the correct result). However, Oracle Database raises a NO_DATA_FOUND exception, and I then have to write application logic down in the exception section. Should I never use an implicit SELECT INTO statement in my code?
I recently learned that if an exception is raised in the declaration section of my block, that block’s exception section cannot handle the exception. That doesn’t seem right. Why does PL/SQL work this way, and what does it mean for my coding practices?
