ORACLE-BASE Blog Aggregator » Eddie Awad

Developer’s Toolbox

Eddie Awad — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:00:59 +0000

I had the privilege to be a guest blogger on the ODTUG blog. I wrote about Kscope and my role in putting together the Developer’s Toolbox track as well as why you should attend Kscope. Here is a short excerpt:

This year’s Kscope is a special one to me. I volunteered to lead the Developer’s Toolbox track team. My task was to build a team of volunteers from the Oracle community and then together determine appropriate sub-tracks, review and rate the submitted abstracts and create a draft schedule for the track.

Read the full blog post here.

Interesting Bug

Eddie Awad — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:58:19 +0000

Michael posted a comment on Martin’s blog, that I previously quoted, about a “hack” to add a comment on a default value definition. Here is an example of how it works (tested in 11.2.0.1):

  SQL> CREATE TABLE t (
    2     x VARCHAR2 (10) DEFAULT 'Hi' -- There. This will be stored too.
    3  );

  Table created.

Notice the comment after the default value. The comment would be ignored, right? think again:

  SQL> COLUMN column_name FORMAT a14
  SQL> COLUMN data_default FORMAT a40
  SQL> SELECT column_name, data_default
    2    FROM user_tab_columns
    3   WHERE table_name = 'T';

  COLUMN_NAME    DATA_DEFAULT
  -------------- ----------------------------------------
  X              'Hi' -- There. This will be stored too.

  1 row selected.

Well, basically this is bug 8546537:

When trying to add a COMMENT to a table, if the ‘)’ is on a new line, then the COMMENT is successfuly created when an error should be raised. The COMMENT also makes it to the Data Dictionary. If the ‘)’ is on the same line, an error is raised.

Interesting!

Comments on Constraints and Indexes in the Database, a Good Idea?

Eddie Awad — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:57:19 +0000

Martin Widlake thinks so:

Comments are great, you can put 4000 characters of information into the database about each table, view and column. This can be a brief description of the object, a full explanation of what a column is to hold or even a list of typical entries for a column or table. But you can’t add a comment on indexes or constraints. Why would I want to? Well, constraints and indexes should only be there for a reason and the reason is not always obvious from either the names of the columns or the name of the constraint or index, especially where you have a naming standard that forces you to name indexes and constraints after the columns they reference.

He goes on to explain the advantages:

If I was able to add comments to constraints and indexes within the database then they would there. You move the system from one platform to the other, they are there. If for any wildly unlikely reason the central documentation lets you down, the information is always there in the database and easy to check. You may not be able to track down the original design documents but you have the database in front of you, so comments in that will persist and be very easy to find.

Martin raises very good points. I believe that it would be a useful feature to have in a future database version.