Now, for sure, we need really good tools to help get the job done, but we also need to think about the workflow we follow to write our code.  You will find my latest ideas about that below. From a methodological standpoint, it draws heavily on Test Driven Development.

I will be building out these ideas further throughout 2007, and also we are looking at ways at incorporating these ideas directly into...

I thought I would take a moment out of my busy Quest Code Tester development efforts (that is, heads-down coding, writing specifications, working with developers in Chicago, Columbus, St. Louis and Russia) to give thanks to Toad.

 

"Way back" in October (that's the way it feels, already), Quest released Toad 9. My initial reaction, probably like many other Toad users (and I do feel like I am quite the typical...

You probably don't give this a second thought, but sometimes the question rears its ugly and bewildering head in the code you are writing – precisely because Oracle itself provides multiple answers to the question, right from inside its own code base. Let's take a closer look.

 

When NO_DATA_FOUND is raised, the error message is:

 

ORA-1403: no data found

 

So...is that character between...

When an exception is raised, one of the most important pieces of information a programmer would love to get hold of is the line of code that caused the exception to be raised.  Before Oracle 10g came long, the only way to get this information was to allow the exception to go unhandled and then view the error stack. The following chain of program calls shows you what I mean.

CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE my_procedure_1...

All those big brain technoids always make such a big deal out of testing. Too many bugs in our software! Bugs cost money! Bugs make us look bad! Test your code before you give it to your users! Test your code before you write your code! Test your code before you learn how to write code! C'mon, I say, give us a break!

Here's the way I look at it: we could bust our buttons working extra special hard to get rid of lots...

Welcome to my Toad World blog! I will offer on this blog a wide variety of tips and incredibly deep and surprising insights on the Oracle PL/SQL language (the object of my obsessive personality for the last 10+ years).  I look forward to your responses and critiques. That is: I hope you will engage with these ideas and feel perfectly comfortable with disagreeing with me, offering other, perhaps better, ideas, and in general...