Skip to Main Content
Learning Oracle PL/SQL
book

Learning Oracle PL/SQL

by Bill Pribyl, Steven Feuerstein
November 2001
Beginner content levelBeginner
424 pages
11h 11m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Learning Oracle PL/SQL

3.7. Now What?

The working title of this chapter was "Treasure In, Treasure Out," a phrase that sums up how most of us start out wanting our programs to behave. I've tried to spice up this chapter with various lessons on programming defensively—that is, programming in such a way that you assume the worst conditions will happen. Your programs should be able to deal with garbage in without producing garbage out.

There are a variety of ways to prevent "garbage out syndrome." We've looked at a few of them in the course of creating a package that services and protects the book data in the database. To summarize:

  • Always remember the possibility that PL/SQL variables and parameters can be null, especially when programming IF-THEN logic.

  • Build and use "table wrappers" with PL/SQL; develop the programming discipline needed to use the approach consistently.

  • When declaring parameters for stored routines, give them default values wherever it makes sense to do so.

  • In general, prefer named notation to positional notation, especially when it adds information that needs to be present.

  • Avoid duplication in your code; doing so will make future modifications less prone to errors.

  • Organize your code into packages rather than into a lot of standalone procedures and functions.

  • Handle exceptions where doing so makes sense, but raise exceptions if your program might encounter problems it shouldn't be deciding how to solve.

  • Use overloading to transfer complexity away from the developer and into the ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Learning Oracle PL/SQL

Learning Oracle PL/SQL

Darryl Hurley
Oracle PL/SQL Programming, Third Edition

Oracle PL/SQL Programming, Third Edition

Steven Feuerstein, Bill Pribyl

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596001800Supplemental ContentCatalog PageErrata