Obsessed with Oracle PL/SQL

So I signed up for my Always Free Autonomous Database (AFAD) and a boatload of other cloud services. OK, what shall I do with them? Hmmm....well....as some of you may know, I've gotten very concerned about climate change and human-caused extinctions. I started a project with Vincent Morneau called fabe - for all a beautiful earth - to help all of us reduce consumption, rescue species and reconnect to nature. Check it out at https://fab.earth . Yes, it is an APEX application and it is already running on an Oracle Database cloud service, so....what else? You know the saying "think globally, act locally"? Well, if fabe is global, then my work on invasive species is local, very  local. When I lived in Chicago, I went out to the nearest "wild" spaces I could find and cut back buckthorn trees that didn't belong in Chicago, out-competed native trees for sunlight, and killed off those native species. I rescued trees  - and the literally millions of living

On September 16, Larry Ellison announced a new Always Free tier for Oracle Cloud, which (for me) most importantly includes an Always Free Autonomous Oracle Database. For nothing but the "cost" of providing your credit card information (which is only used for identification purposes and is henceforth ignored until you decide to upgrade to a paid service), everyone in the world now can use the most powerful, most advanced database in the world FOR FREE. Of course, there are limits. But oh my what generous limits they are! Get lots more details here . And it's not just the amazing Autonomous Database (in both transaction processing and data warehouse flavors). You get Oracle Application Express (APEX) so you can build websites  writing very little code, and taking full advantage of your SQL and PL/SQL skills. You get SQL Developer to write what code you need and manage your database. You get Oracle Rest Data Services to build REST endpoints against your

Find below the list of my blog posts in a series on working with object types (a.k.a, classes) in Oracle Database and, specifically, PL/SQL. This series is not intended to offer an in-depth training on object-oriented development; instead, it introduces basic O-O concepts and shows how they are implemented in Oracle Database with PL/SQL. Introduction to Object Types, Part 1 Object Types and Inheritance, Part 2 Object Types Methods, Part 3 Using Object Types in Relational Tables, Part 4 Comparison Methods for Object Types, Part 5 Dynamic Polymorphism - Why, What, How, Part 6 Each post also contains a link to a LiveSQL script, so you can try out all the code yourself.

Packages have subprograms (procedures and functions). Object types have methods. Object type methods are, still, procedures and functions. But there are also different types and characteristics of methods that only make sense in an object type, which supports inheritance and dynamic polymorphism. In this post, 3rd in my series on object types, I explore Static methods  Member methods  Non-instantiable methods  Invoking methods of super types All the code you see below can be run in Oracle LiveSQL through this script . Member Methods Member methods are methods applied to an instance of the type. Almost all the methods you ever write for an object type will be a member method. Assuming you are already familiar with writing PL/SQL functions and procedures, the most important thing to come up to speed on is the SELF value. Member methods have a built-in (implicit) parameter named SELF that denotes the object instance currently invoking the method. We'll explore m