Oracle PL/SQL Best Practices

Not All Best Practices Are Created Equal

This book contains about 120 distinct recommendations. I could have included many, many more. In fact, I filled up a Rejects document as I wrote the book. Following the proven, “top-down” approach, I first came up with a list of best practices in each area of the language. Then I went through each area, filling in the descriptions, examples, and so on. As I did this, I encountered numerous “best practices” that surely were the right way to do things. The reality, however, is that few people would ever bother to remember and follow them, and if they did bother, it would not make a significant difference in their code.

I had realized, you see, that not all best practices are created equal. Some are much, much more important than others. And some are just better left out of the book, so that readers aren’t distracted by “clutter.” I hope that the result—this book—has an immediate and lasting impact. But even among the best practices I didn’t reject, some stand out as being especially important—so I’ve decided to award these best practices the following prizes:

Grand Prize

SQL-00: Establish and follow clear rules for how to write SQL in your application. (See Chapter 6.)

First Prize

MOD-01: Encapsulate and name business rules and formulas behind function headers. (See Chapter 7.)

Second Prize: Two Winners

EXC-00: Set guidelines for application-wide error handling before you start coding. (See Chapter 5.)

PKG-02: Provide well-defined interfaces to business data and functional manipulation using packages. (See Chapter 8.)

Third Prize: Four Winners

MOD-03: Limit execution section sizes to a single page using modularization. (See Chapter 7.)

DAT-15: Expose package globals using “get and set” modules. (See Chapter 3.)

DEV-03: Walk through each other’s code. (See Chapter 1.)

STYL-09: Comment tersely with value-added information. (See Chapter 2.)

If you follow each of these “best of the best” practices, you will end up with applications that are the joy and envy of developers everywhere!