From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Mon Jan 22 2001 - 17:28:09 MST
James Rogers wrote:
>
> At 11:39 PM 1/22/2001 +0930, Emlyn wrote:
> > > Errrr....I take it that you don't really know how to use SQL*Plus? Things
> > > like conditionals, loops, etc are all supported natively inside SQL*Plus
> > > without doing any of the stuff you are talking about.
> >
> >Damn, caught out; I really don't know it well at all, apparently. Do you
> >have some good links to resources on this? The ones I found were less than
> >good. Loops? Conditionals? Do I have to beg?
>
> Heh. Seriously, people who have been using Oracle for years usually don't
> realize just how much they don't know. Most people consider me to be an
> expert on Oracle development and I *still* regularly learn new and useful
> things about the product. I don't know of any links to resources, but some
> of the third party books like O'Reilly's are good (avoid Oracle's books, as
> they are basically tree dumps of the online docs).
>
I have refused to learn PL/SQL or SQL*Plus any other single db vendor
proprietary language. The world does not need this and I certainly
don't. I don't mind learning a specialized language for database if it
works on all vendor's products of a particular class. I occassionally
learn just enough to write an adaptor to something of my own invention
that is more general. But I believe I do my customers and employers a
disservice if I write their business logic directly in some vendor
proprietary language.
>
> The other thing you need to learn is SQL*Plus. This is a pain, but
> necessary. PL/SQL lets you do what you want, but SQL*Plus sets up the
> environment and controls the scripts. But it isn't as important to learn
> SQL*Plus very well as it is to learn PL/SQL very well; if you don't know
> PL/SQL, you are missing out on a significant portion of the functionality
> in Oracle. When everything is set up right and you know what you are
> doing, you end up with a relatively rich scripting environment that allows
> you to build your own components and tools in a fashion similar to Unix
> tradition.
>
Oracle should be a vendor of relational dbms technology not busy locking
you in to having persistent solutions that work only on Oracle and are
useless on anything else.
- samantha
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