Skip to main content

Quick Guide to Some Sources for Naming Conventions for Oracle Database Development

I occasionally am asked about naming conventions for PL/SQL program units.

I did publish a document back in 2009 (link below), but there are also other sources for naming conventions from others, offering different ideas and excellent motivation for standardizing the way you write your code. I have collected links to them here.

The most important thing about naming conventions is BE CONSISTENT.

PL/SQL Naming Conventions and Coding Standards - Steven Feuerstein 2009

Coding Standards for SQL and PL/SQL - William Robertson

ORACLE-BASE / Tim Hall / Oracle Naming Conventions

Trivadis PL/SQL and SQL Coding Guidelines Version 2.0

Ask Tom on Naming Conventions

PL/SQL and SQL naming conventions

Oracle SQL and PL/SQL Coding Standards – Cat Herding for Dummies

Slideshare Presentation on PL/SQL Coding Conventions

Comments

  1. Thanks Steven for the post.

    The first link which you have published back in 2009,is not working and giving "404 Not Found!" error.

    Could you please check.

    Thanks
    Santhosh

    ReplyDelete
  2. Apologies. That SHOULD have worked, but I should have tested it. I have uploaded the document to OTN, and the link now reflects that.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for the quick action, will check it now.

      Thanks again Steven.

      Delete
  3. "The most important factor in a name is that it concisely (not that we have any choice about that with a limit of 30 characters!) " What about 12.2 :=)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You are right, Daniel. Now we have choice AND responsibility. Of course, a name can be concise when using 50 characters. It depends on what you are trying or need to say - or you are using German. :-)

      Delete
    2. Responsibility was the word. The total length of an identifier, schema.tabel.column might be veeeery long. :)
      Gonna be interesting to see how people use this "feature"

      Delete
    3. I expect that it will be used as follows: I type a name, it's kinda long - 32, 35, maybe 40 characters - but the compiler no longer complains so I use it.

      Delete

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...

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, ...

PL/SQL 101: Save your source code to files

PL/SQL is a database programming language. This means that your source code is compiled into  and executed from within the Oracle Database. There are many fantastic consequences of this fact, many of which are explored in Bryn Llewellyn's Why Use PL/SQL? whitepaper. But this also can mean that developers see the database as the natural repository for the original source code , and this is a bad mistake to make. It's not the sort of mistake any JavaScript or Java or php developer would ever make, because that code is not compiled into the database (well, you can  compile Java into the database, but that's not where 99.99% of all Java code lives). But it's a mistake that apparently too many Oracle Database developers make. So here's the bottom line: Store each PL/SQL program unit in its own file . Use a source code control system to manage those files. Compile them into the database as needed for development and testing. In other words: you should never kee...