From: Emlyn (emlyn@one.net.au)
Date: Mon Jan 22 2001 - 18:36:46 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 did get myself a book on Oracle; it's pathetic. Any specific
recommendations?
> To get the most out of the Oracle environment you need to know a few
> things. Most importantly, you need to learn PL/SQL and learn it
> well. PL/SQL is an Ada-like language (should be trivial for you, since
you
> know Delphi), is very easy to learn for an experienced programmer, and
> gives you all the procedural constructs you need. However, it has some
> quirks and oddities that nothing but experience will teach. The O'Reilly
> book (PL/SQL Programming) is the best reference on the language that I
know
> of. The beauty of PL/SQL isn't that it is a wonderful language (it isn't
> -- much too verbose), but that you can embed PL/SQL procedural blocks into
> just about everything in Oracle. You can mingle PL/SQL code with your
> SQL/commands/environment/etc in SQL*Plus (what you are looking for). You
> can use PL/SQL to extend the SQL syntax (e.g. you can use custom
procedural
> logic in your WHERE clauses). There are also a bunch of standard
libraries
> in PL/SQL that allow you to interact with various parts of the system
> (scheduling jobs, accessing files, etc). Additionally, you can link
shared
> libraries into Oracle and map the call interfaces to PL/SQL to extend the
> functionality and effectively give an unlimited number of
> capabilities. And generally speaking, nothing runs faster for doing
> procedural database logic, though it is dog slow for many other things
> (like arithmetic). The details of how to do all these things is in the
> documentation.
>
I didn't know I could mingle PL/SQL in with the regular stuff; I'll have to
work out how to do this, thanks.
I must say that I suspected as much, but then found all these sites doing
bizarre stuff with SQL*PLUS and
thought it must be the only way (otherwise why on earth would you do these
things?)
> 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.
Cool. I'd prefer to concentrate on PL/SQL... something I've done a lot of is
TransactSQL for
SQLServer 6.5/7 (yes, please kill me now), an hideous language but stored
procedures is stored procedures; gotta have them. I'm very interested in
PL/SQL. However, because I'm writing code at the moment to target both SQL
Server and Oracle, so stored procs are basically out, as is anything beyond
fairly standard SQL (nonstandard as it is). But for scripting... sure.
>
>
> >"DBAs exist to keep developers from getting bored." - can I have this as
a
> >quote?
>
>
> Sure.
>
Thanks. Nice.
>
> >Do I remember that you do really scary code generation stuff? The memory
is
> >vague.
>
>
> Yes, but my bread-n-butter is system and application architecture on big
> Oracle systems.
>
I'm mostly small systems myself. It's a surprisingly interesting world, but
has a lot more to do with budget and time constraints I think.
Emlyn
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