Skip to main content

"Give me a project I can work on, Steven!" OK, here you go....

Probably once a month, I receive an email from a programmer who either wants to tune up their Oracle Database programming skills (SQL and PL/SQL, primarily) or wants to help me or the community in some way.

Here's the latest, via LinkedIn Messages:

My friends and I are just in love with Oracle PL/SQL and the whole concept of database development and database design. This is like a religion for us. Can you you provide us some work to do?


I don't have a handy set of projects for people to work on, especially now that I am back with Oracle.

But there are plenty of opportunities for you out there, especially if you'd like to help build community tools. So here's a short list. I hope readers will offer others via the Comments section.

1. OraOpenSource - github.com/oraopensource

A project of oraopensource.com, led by Martin Giffy D'Souza, this repo offers an ever-growing set of utilities, with lots of room for expansion.




2. utPLSQL - github.com/utplsql

utPLSQL, which I originally built in 1999, is one of the most popular xUnit variants (JUnit, NUnit, etc.) for PL/SQL developers. It has recently moved to Github and is in the process of being revamped for a big V3 release. It's all written in PL/SQL!

3. oddGen - oddgen.org

oddgen is an Oracle SQL Developer extension to invoke dictionary-driven code generators.



4. Alexandria Library - https://github.com/mortenbra/alexandria-plsql-utils

This library is a collection of various utility packages for PL/SQL, as well as links to useful libraries hosted and maintained elsewhere.

Two more great resources, though you have to come up with your own project ideas to use them:

1. I encourage you sign up for an apex.oracle.com workspace. You can then build your own websites using  Oracle Application Express, using nothing but SQL, PL/SQL and some Javascript if you want to get fancy.

2. Use LiveSQL.oracle.com to play around with SQL and PL/SQL, as well as take advantage of an ever-growing library of scripts.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Quick Guide to User-Defined Types in Oracle PL/SQL

A Twitter follower recently asked for more information on user-defined types in the PL/SQL language, and I figured the best way to answer is to offer up this blog post. PL/SQL is a strongly-typed language . Before you can work with a variable or constant, it must be declared with a type (yes, PL/SQL also supports lots of implicit conversions from one type to another, but still, everything must be declared with a type). PL/SQL offers a wide array of pre-defined data types , both in the language natively (such as VARCHAR2, PLS_INTEGER, BOOLEAN, etc.) and in a variety of supplied packages (e.g., the NUMBER_TABLE collection type in the DBMS_SQL package). Data types in PL/SQL can be scalars, such as strings and numbers, or composite (consisting of one or more scalars), such as record types, collection types and object types. You can't really declare your own "user-defined" scalars, though you can define subtypes  from those scalars, which can be very helpful from the p...

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...

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...