Obsessed with Oracle PL/SQL

I put together this blog post for those interested in learning more about the SmartDB (also or formerly known as "ThickDB") architecture and how to apply it in your applications. I will update it as more resources become available. What is SmartDB? Here's a summary: Large software systems must be built from modules. A module hides its implementation behind an interface that exposes its functionality. This is computer science’s most famous principle. For applications that use an Oracle Database, the database is, of course, one of the modules. The implementation details are the tables and the SQL statements that manipulate them. These are hidden behind a PL/SQL interface. This is the Smart Database paradigm: select, insert, update, delete, merge, commit, and rollback are issued only from database PL/SQL. Developers and end-users of applications built this way are happy with their correctness, maintainability, security, and performance. But when developers follow the ...

When something mutates, it is changing. Something that is changing is hard to analyze and to quantify. A mutating table error (ORA-04091) occurs when a row-level trigger tries to examine or change a table that is already undergoing change (via an INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE statement). In particular, this error occurs when a row-level trigger attempts to read or write the table from which the trigger was fired. Fortunately, the same restriction does not apply in statement-level triggers. In this post, I demonstrate the kind of scenario that will result in an ORA-04091 errors. I then show the "traditional" solution, using a collection defined in a package. Then I demonstrate how to use the compound trigger, added in Oracle Database 11g Release1,  to solve the problem much more simply. All the code shown in this example may be found in this LiveSQL script . How to Get a Mutating Table Error I need to implement this rule on my employees table: Your new salary cannot ...