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

Labels:

Comments

  1. SanthoshOctober 24, 2016 at 10:51 AM

    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. Steven FeuersteinOctober 24, 2016 at 11:00 AM

    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. SanthoshOctober 24, 2016 at 11:02 AM

      Thanks for the quick action, will check it now.

      Thanks again Steven.

      Delete
  3. DanielOctober 26, 2016 at 12:52 AM

    "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. Steven FeuersteinOctober 26, 2016 at 5:24 AM

      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. DanielOctober 26, 2016 at 6:59 AM

      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. Steven FeuersteinOctober 26, 2016 at 11:15 AM

      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...
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