Skip to main content

PL/SQL Now Available for Microsoft Excel, MongoDB, Cassandra and VoltDB!

In a surprise announcement today [April Fool's Day, I now point out on 2 April], Oracle Corporation announced that the PL/SQL language, its (formerly) proprietary database programming language, would now be available as open source on Github.

Simultaneously, Oracle Corporation announced that PL/SQL would now compile and run on MongoDB, Cassandra, VoltDB (as well as the other 256 database products Michael Stonebreaker has helped establish over the last several decades) and, in recognition of the primacy of business analysts the world over, Microsoft Excel.

Bryn Llewellyn, Senior Distracted PL/SQL Product Manager, could not suppress his excitement over these developments: "For years, I've had to content myself with answering questions just from Oracle technologists. Now I can spend all day and all night long answering questions from another 10,000,000 developers. Thanks, Oracle, for making my day."

Steven Feuerstein, TMWKOP (The Man Who Knows Only PL/SQL), was unaccountably glum. He told the San Francisco Chronicle in an interview for this breaking story that "I was perfectly happy with the status quo. We had our tight little community, everyone knew who I was. I felt special. Now?  Now we're just one more open source project that everyone can play with and criticize. What's so great about that?"

For more information, visit www.oracle.com/plsql.

About Oracle

Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com.

About Oracle OpenWorld

Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco is the most important business and technology conference of the year for Oracle customers, prospective customers, and partners. This educational conference is dedicated to helping businesses optimize existing systems and understand upcoming industry trends and breakthroughs driven by technology. Oracle OpenWorld offers more than 2,700 educational sessions, hundreds of demos and hands-on labs, and exhibitions from more than 450 partners and customers from around the world showcasing applications, middleware, database, server and storage systems, industries, management, cloud, and infrastructure solutions—all engineered for innovation. For more information; to register; or to watch Oracle OpenWorld keynotes, sessions, and more, visit www.oracle.com/openworld. Join the Oracle OpenWorld discussion on Twitter, Facebook, and the Oracle OpenWorld blog.



Comments

  1. AnonymousApril 1, 2015 at 1:30 PM

    1st of April :-)? But still I enjoy every Post of You! VERY HELPFULL 4 A YOUNG PROFESSIONAL like me!! Best regards from Germany
    Jonas

    ReplyDelete
  2. Steven FeuersteinApril 1, 2015 at 1:31 PM

    I have been informed by Oracle Legal that I am not permitted to comment on this news until after 1 April.

    :-)

    Glad you enjoyed it!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Steven FeuersteinApril 2, 2015 at 5:25 AM

    And now I can confess to all: this was an April Fool's prank. PL/SQL has not been open sourced. It is still proprietary to Oracle Corporation (though both DB2 and PostgresSQL offer limited support for compilation and execution of PL/SQL code against those databases) and there are no plans - I repeat, NO PLANS - to support PL/SQL on Microsoft Excel.

    :-)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Michael A. RifeApril 16, 2015 at 10:38 AM

    I read your post on Twitter, but did not notice that date of publication. Nice!!

    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 wo...
4 comments
Read more

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, ...
4 comments
Read more

PL/SQL 101: Three ways to get error message/stack in PL/SQL

The PL/SQL Challenge quiz for 10 September - 16 September 2016 explored the different ways you can obtain the error message / stack in PL/SQL. Note: an error stack is a sequence of multiple error messages that can occur when an exception is propagated and re-raised through several layers of nested blocks. The three ways are: SQLERRM - The original, traditional and (oddly enough) not currently recommended function to get the current error message. Not recommended because the next two options avoid a problem which you are unlikely  to run into: the error stack will be truncated at 512 bytes, and you might lose some error information. DBMS_UTILITY.FORMAT_ERROR_STACK - Returns the error message / stack, and will not truncate your string like SQLERRM will. UTL_CALL_STACK API - Added in Oracle Database 12c, the UTL_CALL_STACK package offers a comprehensive API into the execution call stack, the error stack and the error backtrace.  Note: check out this LiveSQL script if...
5 comments
Read more