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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.
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Author: |
StevenFeuersteinTW |
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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 PL/SQL: |
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Naming Conventions and Coding Standards, the Feuerstein Way |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Thursday, May 28, 2009 10:32 AM
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I am often asked about the naming conventions and coding standards that I use. My answer is usually a combination of muttering and vague statements and hand-waving.
That's because I have a confession: I don't have a single naming conventions and coding standards document that I use. Why not? Because I am a software developer! That is, I feel (well, I &l ...
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A Classic Error in My Monthly Puzzle! |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Monday, April 27, 2009 8:47 AM
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Every month, a Toad World newsletter goes out to thousands of Toad users and it includes a monthly puzzle that I write. Last month's puzzle went like this:
Which of the following blocks does not contain an infinite loop?
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An interview with Steven Feuerstein |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Wednesday, April 22, 2009 6:06 PM
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In case you simply can't get enough of Steven Feuerstein (no, I don't generally talk about my self in the third person or in the royal "we"), I invite you to check out this interview. I had an awful lot of fun answering the questions, and you might be entertained reading them. |
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A handy string parsing utility - extended |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Monday, April 13, 2009 9:57 AM
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It's truly one of the oddities of the PL/SQL language that it does not offer a delimited string parsing program. The closest we can get is DBMS_UTILITY.COMMA_TO_TABLE, and that is sadly deficient (it only parses comma-delimited strings and each item between the commas must be a valid PL/SQL identifier).
So I built one myself (the parse package) and put ...
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Run an OS command from within PL/SQL |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Friday, March 27, 2009 6:14 AM
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Developers are hard people to satisfy. Oracle gives us this incredibly robust, powerful and easy to use database programming language – and all we can do is complain about what it doesn't do for us.
Well, that's reality for you: PL/SQL is powerful and robust and easy to use, but also very narrowly focused. So if you want it to do something outside of its area ...
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Automatic refactoring in PL/SQL tools – Part 1 |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Tuesday, December 09, 2008 12:23 PM
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I have long been attracted to the idea and process of refactoring (explained below). It is now very exciting to see that automated refactoring features are working their way into tools for PL/SQL development. I will analyze these features over the next few entries in my ToadWorld blog, starting with SQL Develop ...
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Congratulations to the newest Oracle Magazine PL/SQL Developer of the Year! |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Monday, November 03, 2008 8:03 AM
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As I travel certain parts of the globe doing presentations on PL/SQL, I meet many extremely talented PL/SQL programmers – people who meet the most complex challenges you can imagine with a deft combination of intense creativity, hard work, and of course Oracle PL/SQL.
Oracle Magazine names only one as the PL/SQL Developer of the Year at each Oracle Open World, and this year the award was g ...
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Play games to become a better developer! |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Tuesday, October 28, 2008 9:23 AM
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Part 2: The Game of Mastermind
Software development is one heck of a serious job. It turns out, however, that there are several games you can play to improve the quality of code you write. This is the second of two blog entries that introduce you to two of my favorite brain development and training games:
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Play games to become a better developer! |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Monday, October 20, 2008 7:01 AM
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Part 1: The Game of Set
Software development is one heck of a serious job. It turns out, however, that there are several games you can play to improve the quality of code you write. This is the first of two blog entries that introduce you to two of my favorite brain development and training games: Set and Mastermin ...
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Doing SQL in PL/SQL: key resource from Bryn Llewellyn |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Wednesday, October 08, 2008 10:09 AM
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One of the highlights of Oracle Open World 2008 for me was the presentation by Bryn Llewellyn (PL/SQL Product Manager) on “Doing SQL in PL/SQL.”
Bryn surely has the most thorough and clear understanding of the PL/SQL language of anyone I have met (definitely including me).
His talk was detailed ...
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For loops or While loops to scan collections? |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Monday, September 22, 2008 9:21 AM
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I have generally recommended in the past that whenever you are writing code to iterate through the elements of a collection, you should use a while loop, combined with the FIRST-NEXT or LAST-PRIOR collection methods.
The key advantage of this approach is that the code will not raise a NO_DATA_FOUND exception if your collection is sparse (there is an index value be ...
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Oracle Open World Presentations |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Tuesday, July 22, 2008 8:41 AM
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Hey folks,
For anyone attending Oracle Open World this year, here is my schedule of presentations:
Session ID: S300184
Session Title: Weird PL/SQL
Track: Oracle Develop: Database
Room: Golden Gate C3
Date: 2008-09-21
Start Time: 15:45
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Always Bulk Collect |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Monday, June 23, 2008 7:34 AM
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You learn something new every day, right? Well, I certainly do (more or less). Even about PL/SQL, about which I am sure many people think I already know everything. Far from it.
In fact, I learned just last week from the PL/SQL Product Manager, Bryn Llewellyn, that his recommendation regarding cursor FOR loops and bulk collect is different fro ...
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How to Run an OS Command from PL/SQL |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Wednesday, June 04, 2008 7:11 AM
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Oracle doesn't make it terribly easy to run operating system commands from within a PL/SQL block. I suppose that's understandable, given that PL/SQL is an embedded database-oriented language. Still, developers do ask me on a regular basis about how they can do this.
As I understand it, there are basically three ways to do this:
- Invoke a Java method from wit ...
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Testing and refreshing data from production |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Thursday, April 17, 2008 9:21 AM
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As many of my readers likely know by now, I have been working for the past several years on the Quest Code Tester development effort.
Code Tester is the most powerful PL/SQL test automation tool available. You describe the expected behavior of your programs and Code Tester generates your test code, which can then be run from the UI or via a script. With Code Teste ...
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Auto-formatting of templates for Toad |
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StevenFeuersteinTW
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Thursday, April 10, 2008 9:14 AM
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A few months ago, I posted on this blog an explanation of how to use Toad's Code Templates to standardize development and improve productivity. I included an XML document that contains over 20 templates that I thought you might find useful. I also asked my readers to produce XML transformations so that the XML document could be "output" in the format that Toad recognizes (and SQL Navigator as ...
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