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Blogs
Toad and Database Commentaries |
Toad World blogs are a mix of insightful how-tos from Quest experts as well as their commentary on experiences with new database technologies. Have some views of your own to share? Post your comments! Note: Comments are restricted to registered Toad World users.
 Do you have a topic that you'd like discussed? We'd love to hear from you. Send us your idea for a blog topic.
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Author: |
StevenFeuersteinTW |
Created: |
Thursday, October 26, 2006 10:47 AM |
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Steven Feuerstein is considered one of the world's leading experts on the Oracle PL/SQL language, having written ten books on PL/SQL (all published by O'Reilly Media, including Oracle PL/SQL Programming. Steven has been developing software since 1980, spent five years with Oracle (1987-1992) and has served as PL/SQL Evangelist for Quest Software since January 2001. He is also an Oracle ACE Director. He writes regularly for Oracle Magazine, which named him the PL/SQL Developer of the Year in both 2002 and 2006.
Steven's blog provides advice and code that you can put to immediate use in your world of programming.
Recent postings on his PL/SQL Obsession:
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In what version did Oracle add that feature? |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Friday, September 14, 2007 11:08 AM
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I get this question a lot. I am teaching a class and a student asks: "When did Oracle add autonomous transactions?" Or the INDICES of clause. Or – who knows what?
Seeing as I am totally obses ...
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Quseful #7: Kill those infinite loops! |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Wednesday, August 29, 2007 12:42 PM
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I don't know about you, but I sometimes write code that (inadvertently, not on purpose) contains an infinite loop. So I run my program and Toad goes off into never-never land, with Oracle chewing up CPU cycles so intently that it is hard to connect as SYS and kill the session.
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Quseful #6: Generate collections of random values |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Friday, August 17, 2007 9:27 AM
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You will find in this Quseful a package that will generate/return collections of random values of strings, numbers and dates. It also contains a "self-test" random_verifier procedure that you can run to verify "at a glance" that the values being generated seem
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Quseful #5: Does that string contain a valid number? |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Monday, August 06, 2007 2:01 PM
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I offer in this Quseful (Quick and Useful) a package that you can use to determine if a string contains a valid integer, number, binary_float or binary_double (note: if you are not running Oracle 10g, you will need to comment out the binary_* versions in this package). It is based on code I wrote about back in 1997 (available
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Confessions of a Hypocritical Programmer |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Friday, June 22, 2007 11:19 AM
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That's me. A hypocritical programmer. And I am here to admit it, to make a confession.
Hypocrisy has got to be one of the most infuriating traits of human beings.
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Feuerstein in Buenos Aires and Magic Tricks |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Wednesday, May 09, 2007 11:24 AM
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It is Wednesday, May 09, 2007 and I am sitting in the Admiral's Club at the Buenos Aires airport. I just finished two days in this lovely city. My first day was spent enjoying the chilly, but very sunny afternoon, walking for four hours around the city. It is a busy, busy place with many buses throwing way too much gritty exhaust into the air (hey, ...
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Greetings from Las Vegas! |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Thursday, April 19, 2007 9:16 AM
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I am visiting this, well, very artificial paradise dropped into the middle of a desert, so as to participate in Collaborate 07. It's been an interesting and fun several days. I have a room on the 26th floor of the Mandalay
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Send a memo to yourself! |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Thursday, March 29, 2007 9:37 AM
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I rediscovered the joy of writing to myself a week ago, and I also was reminded of the danger of coding in isolation (that is, working by oneself).
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You call this work? |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Wednesday, March 14, 2007 9:54 AM
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Some musings about the life of a programmer....
Two weeks ago, we held the second annual Oracle PL/SQL Programming conference (I talked about it in last week's
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Tracing, Testing, Debugging |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Friday, February 23, 2007 5:16 PM
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Test your code! Debug your code! Trace your code! We all hear about how we should or at least could perform these activities with our programs. And all too often the terms and usages seem to blur, and be confused. In reality, these three activities – test, debug, trace – are all quite different in nature and serve different purposes.
This blog entry o ...
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What's New with Quest Code Tester for Oracle 1.5 |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Wednesday, February 14, 2007 2:09 PM
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The Major Enhancements in the 1.5 Release
Of course, we spent lots of time just fixing bugs and making lots of small changes. But there were some very critical "big ticket" enhancements that were requeste ...
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Here comes Quest Code Tester for Oracle! |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Wednesday, February 07, 2007 11:26 AM
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As I write these very words, we are preparing to release the commercial release of Quest Code Tester for Oracle 1.5.
I hope that you have already heard about this new testing tool. If not, I offer a quick intro/overview ...
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Sharing the wealth (of knowledge and expertise) |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Wednesday, January 31, 2007 12:07 PM
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I recently spent two days training a group of about 30 developers and DBAs out east. As with any sizeable collection of technologists, the level of expertise and the years of experience varied greatly (and don't always go hand in hand!).
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An Ode to Toad |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Tuesday, December 19, 2006 3:47 PM
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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.
&l ...
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Are errors positive or negative? |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Monday, December 04, 2006 10:30 PM
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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.
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PL/SQL Breadcrumbs |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Thursday, November 09, 2006 11:55 AM
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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.
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Aw, who cares about testing, anyway? |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Thursday, November 02, 2006 11:28 AM
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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!
< ...
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Three Tips Most Excellent for PL/SQL Developers |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Monday, October 30, 2006 4:58 PM
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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, i ...
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