Skip to main content

Practically Perfect PL/SQL - A new video channel for PL/SQL developers!

Let this post serve as the official, groundbreaking, ground-shaking launch of (drum roll).....


This is a new Youtube/Oracle Learning Library channel that will feature my latest and greatest videos on Oracle PL/SQL and more. 

Within the P3 channel, I will set up a number and fill a number of different playlists. 


Four videos in the series are up with more to follow over the next week.

So....you might be wondering: why is this channel called "Practically Perfect PL/SQL"?

Let me count the ways:

1. Most important of all, triple alliteration: P3. Humans love alliteration and I like to give them what they want.

2. Sure, I want to talk about the features of PL/SQL, but mostly what I want to do is help developers write the best PL/SQL code they (we) can.  

We all want to be perfect, but since that is not possible, mostly what we will do is strive for perfection. We will try to be "practically" or almost perfect.

It's also a reminder to myself and everyone else writing PL/SQL and reading/watching my stuff, that I sure am not perfect. I violate my own best practices on a regular basis, I make changes in production (oh, say it isn't so, Steven!), I take short-cuts. 

3. Celebrate the practicality of programmers. We are, fundamentally, problem solvers - problem solvers working under deadlines. 

This means that when we hit an obstacle (a bug, bad requirements, changed specifications), we:
  • Never whine.
  • Never criticize another developer, especially if they are no longer on the team.
  • Never complain about users.
That's right: Never. Not us programmers, no. 

We are too practical, too pragmatic, to waste our cycles like that. We simply figure out how to work around the obstacle and get the job done.

I hope you enjoy, and maybe even learn from, the P3 videos. 

But even if you don't, please watch every single one, multiple times, so I get my view counts up really high! 

And do not hesitate to give me feedback, directly on the video page, here on this post, or through an email to steven.feuerstein@oracle.com.

Comments

  1. SQL is great I can only say this: DBASE + CLIPPER + ACCESS = SQL

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

      Delete
  2. Not even one reference to Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way? Maybe I did watch that movie too often.
    That said, I subscribed to this youtube channel of course! Looking forward to taking some time this weekend to watch them vids.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I know I watched that movie, and my wife did mention it to me as well. But clearly it didn't make a strong enough impression. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Would you be so kind as to post the code shown in the Practically Perfect PL/SQL series?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Visit oracle.com/oll/plsql and download the demo.zip file. In the zip, you will find: hardcoding.sql, fullname.pks and fullname.pkb.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Running out of PGA memory with MULTISET ops? Watch out for DISTINCT!

A PL/SQL team inside Oracle made excellent use of nested tables and MULTISET operators in SQL, blending data in tables with procedurally-generated datasets (nested tables).  All was going well when they hit the dreaded: ORA-04030: out of process memory when trying to allocate 2032 bytes  They asked for my help.  The error occurred on this SELECT: SELECT  *    FROM header_tab trx    WHERE (generated_ntab1 SUBMULTISET OF trx.column_ntab)       AND ((trx.column_ntab MULTISET             EXCEPT DISTINCT generated_ntab2) IS EMPTY) The problem is clearly related to the use of those nested tables. Now, there was clearly sufficient PGA for the nested tables themselves. So the problem was in executing the MULTISET-related functionality. We talked for a bit about dropping the use of nested tables and instead doing everything in SQL, to avoid the PGA error. That would, however require lots of work, revamping algorithms, ensuring correctness, you know the score. Then my eyes snagge

How to Pick the Limit for BULK COLLECT

This question rolled into my In Box today: In the case of using the LIMIT clause of BULK COLLECT, how do we decide what value to use for the limit? First I give the quick answer, then I provide support for that answer Quick Answer Start with 100. That's the default (and only) setting for cursor FOR loop optimizations. It offers a sweet spot of improved performance over row-by-row and not-too-much PGA memory consumption. Test to see if that's fast enough (likely will be for many cases). If not, try higher values until you reach the performance level you need - and you are not consuming too much PGA memory.  Don't hard-code the limit value: make it a parameter to your subprogram or a constant in a package specification. Don't put anything in the collection you don't need. [from Giulio Dottorini] Remember: each session that runs this code will use that amount of memory. Background When you use BULK COLLECT, you retrieve more than row with each fetch,

Quick Guide to User-Defined Types in Oracle PL/SQL

A Twitter follower recently asked for more information on user-defined types in the PL/SQL language, and I figured the best way to answer is to offer up this blog post. PL/SQL is a strongly-typed language . Before you can work with a variable or constant, it must be declared with a type (yes, PL/SQL also supports lots of implicit conversions from one type to another, but still, everything must be declared with a type). PL/SQL offers a wide array of pre-defined data types , both in the language natively (such as VARCHAR2, PLS_INTEGER, BOOLEAN, etc.) and in a variety of supplied packages (e.g., the NUMBER_TABLE collection type in the DBMS_SQL package). Data types in PL/SQL can be scalars, such as strings and numbers, or composite (consisting of one or more scalars), such as record types, collection types and object types. You can't really declare your own "user-defined" scalars, though you can define subtypes  from those scalars, which can be very helpful from the p