Monday, January 23, 2006

So you want some PL/SQL content, eh?

Not surprisingly, many people visiting my blog wonder why I am not talking about PL/SQL.

Hey, it's a great language, and it's made my life a thing at which I marvel daily, but there's more to life than PL/SQL, and so far I am using this blog as an outlet primarily for non-PL/SQL thoughts -- though I expect as I settle into this thing more and more PL/SQL-related posts will appear.

Having said that, I do publish a monthly PL/SQL newsletter - OPP/News - and you can click here to sign up for the newsletter.

You can read previous editions of the newsletter by clicking here.

And here are some excerpts that you might find interesting...

December 2005

Tip of the Month: Insights into PL/SQL Integers

When it comes to declaring and manipulating integers, Oracle offers lots of options, including INTEGER, BINARY_INTEGER, PLS_INTEGER, POSITIVE, SIGN_TYPE...the question that immediately comes to my mind is: how much of a difference in performance does the choice of datatype make in my program? I put together a script to analyze precisely that: the integer_compare script set. It comes in two flavors: integer_compare.sql, which can used in Oracle Database 10g (relies on DBMS_UTILITY.GET_CPU_TIME to compute elapsed time) and integer_compare_pre_10g.sql, which can used in versions earlier than Oracle Database 10g (relies on DBMS_UTILITY.GET_TIME to compute elapsed time).

November 2005

Useful Code of the Month: Emulate primary key and unique indexes

The summer reading package shown above demonstrates a very powerful technique: emulation of primary key and unique indexes in collections, relying on string-based indexes for concatenated indexes and string values in the key or index definition. Unfortunately, you have to write a whole bunch of code to take advantage of this technique -- or do you?

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