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

Three tips for getting started right with Oracle Database development

By "Oracle Database development", I mean, more or less, writing SQL and PL/SQL. I assume in this post that you have access to Oracle Database (which you can get via Cloud services, Docker , GitHub and OTN ). A. Use a powerful IDE, designed with database programming in mind. There are lots of editors out there, and many IDEs that work with Oracle Database. Sure, you could use Notepad, but OMG the productivity loss. You could also use a popular editor like Sublime, and then it get it working with Oracle. I suggest, however, that you  download  and install Oracle's own own, free, powerful IDE: SQL Developer . If you like to complement your graphical IDE with a command line tool (or OMG if you actually prefer  a command line tool to a graphical interface), you should also check out the relatively new and generating-lots-of-excitement SQLcl . B. Enable compile-time warnings and PL/Scope. The database has tons of useful functionality burned right into it, ready for...
8 comments
Read more

Why DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE should not be in your application code

A database developer recently came across my  Bulletproof PL/SQL  presentation, which includes this slide. That first item in the list caught his attention: Never put calls to DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE in your application code. So he sent me an email asking why I would say that. Well, I suppose that is the problem with publishing slide decks. All the explanatory verbiage is missing. I suppose maybe I should do a video. :-) But in the meantime, allow me to explain. First, what does DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE do? It writes text out to a buffer, and when your current PL/SQL block terminates, the buffer is displayed on your screen. [Note: there can be more to it than that. For example, you could in your own code call DBMS_OUTPUT.GET_LINE(S) to get the contents of the buffer and do something with it, but I will keep things simple right now.] Second, if I am telling you not to use this built-in, how could text from your program be displayed on your screen? Not without a lot o...
4 comments
Read more

The future of Oracle PL/SQL: some thoughts on Sten Vesterli's thoughts

Sten Vesterli published a very thought-provoking post on his blog: Please stop reading this post, and read that one. When you are done, come on back here for my thoughts on Sten's thoughts. OK. You read it. Here we go. First, thanks, Sten, for being such an interesting, wise, sometimes provocative voice in our community. Next, Sten writes: Now, on the one hand, I certainly agree that the vast majority of young developers are currently caught up in the modern version of a Gold Rush, which is: "Build an app using JavaScript, pay no attention to that database behind the curtain." But I can assure you that I still do meet young PL/SQL programmers, regularly, when I am at conferences and doing onsite presentations at companies. So, young person who writes PL/SQL: do not be afraid! You are not alone! And you are super-smart to have made the choice you did. :-) Next, Sten offers this advice to managers: I agree that PL/SQL is a "spec...
46 comments
Read more