Sep 2007: How to save $1 Billion in expenses

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Toad World Puzzler - September 2007

How to save $1 Billion in expenses

Several years ago, Oracle made a big splash in the media with an announcement that they had saved $1B in expenses by fully utilizing their own web-based applications. A secret memo leaked to me last week shows, however, that their cost-cutting measures were much more far-reaching. Here is what the memo said:

The PL/SQL Feature Cost Evaluator (known commonly as the Piffkey) has determined that it costs Oracle Corporation $221 to declare a new exception in the PL/SQL language. Therefore, every effort should be made to reuse previously-defined exceptions whenever possible. Please notify all members of the PL/SQL Development Team to "Think Before Adding" or TBA, and we can all contribute to Larry's mighty vision of a $1B savings this year!

Well, the team must have taken that request to heart, because they reuse the exception NO_DATA_FOUND in a number of circumstances.

So, the Toad World quiz for this month is:

Which of the following circumstances does not raise a NO_DATA_FOUND exception?

A. A SELECT INTO statement that finds no rows
B. A numeric FOR loop whose low value or high value is NULL
C. An attempt to get the value of an element in a collection whose index is not defined
D. Reading past the end of a file with UTL_FILE
E. Reading past the end of a BFILE with DBMS_LOB

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