Obsessed with Oracle PL/SQL

A long, long time ago in a blog long ago lost to the shrouds and clouds of memory, I published a Ten Commandments of PL/SQL Development. A Twitter follower recently asked me for them, and lo and behold actually found them lurking in a Word doc on my drive. So I have decided to share them with you, largely unchanged. In some places I have struck through entirely irrelevant or outdated text, and also offered updates for 2019. 1. Thou shalt encapsulate your SQL statements behind procedure and function calls. Sure, it's really, really easy to write SQL in your PL/SQL programs -- in fact, it's way too easy. SQL is the "Achilles' heel" of your application code. You code and you code and you code, and before you know it, you have dozens of variations of the same SQL statement making their negative performance impact known in your application. You can't analyze the impact of data structure changes and you find enhancements to be very expensive. Solution? Put all ...

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...