Oracle PL/SQL Best Practices, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6. Doing the Right Thing When Stuff Goes Wrong

“Stop being so negative, Steven!”, “Why do you always assume the worst?”, “You’re such a ‘glass half empty’ person, Steven.”

Ah, the grief I get when I try to convince people of all that is wrong with the world! Can’t you just enjoy life, they plead, instead of complaining about it? Sure, I can and I do. But I’ll bet each of you knows a person like me: a congenital whiner, always finding problems, always taking the fun out of it for everyone else. (Oh, by the way, there is a web site for such folks at www.despair.com.)

Well, I suggest that in the world of programming, the whiners are correct, and should be highly prized resources on any development team! (Hire me, please!) You see, almost every programmer thinks he (gender choice is deliberate) is the cat’s meow, the finest coder who ever lived. He can do no wrong; he writes really cool code; he is so, so clever; and he needs to write nary a comment in his code. As a result, that amazing code contains no errors and always acts exactly as expected. So why should such a remarkable person (like you, like me?) deal with the negative? That’s someone else’s problem.

Even if we accept that such a person actually exists (ha!), I would still argue that Super Programmer needs to pay lots of attention to error management. After all, those fickle, kinda dumb users might still use his program incorrectly, causing that pristine work of logic to fail.

No doubt about it: whether you are the perfect ...