[OT] PL/SQL style guide

[Uli Kobsa]

Hi,

as I have to collect information for a style guide for PL/SQL development: do you know some good resources for that?

Thanks,
Uli

 

[D.]

Uli,

Good source is "Oracle PL/SQL Best Practices" by Steven Feuerstein.

D.

 

[William Robertson]

www.williamrobertson.net/plsqlstandards/

 

[Uli Kobsa]

Thanks to all for the hints!

greetings,
Uli

 

[Stew Stryker]

Originally posted by WilliamRobertson:
www.williamrobertson.net/plsqlstandards/

William,

This is a very interesting standards document. Could I ask what it was developed it for? ...your company, your team, yourself? Also, are these just your thoughts, or have they been reviewed, modified, hacked, etc?

I'm asking because I see a lot of value in it, but I'd love to be able to make comments and counter-arguments for some of your standards.

Have you considered publishing this as something like a Wiki, were anyone can post comments, edits, etc?

Or maybe I could just send you my thoughts offline? But it really looks like something that a lot of people in this forum would have an interest in.

Thanks,

 

[William Robertson]

It was originally the document that you can (still) download from O'Reilly to go with the "Oracle Best Practices" book. I changed a few things I disagreed with (mainly SQL layout - the way Feuerstein right-aligns his keywords for absolutely no reason drives me up the wall, as you can probably tell), updated a couple of points (it was written in Oracle 8.0 days) and added some other stuff (the sections about exception handling and OUT parameters, for example). I'd recently been on a project where a new PM had demanded a Coding Standards document without really knowing anything about Oracle, or programming (or project management ) and had accepted the first one someone found on the net - it was pretty terrible. I guess I was thinking, next time someone asks I'll show them this. In particular I wanted it to say why, not just because we say so. Then when I got the web space I reformatted it in HTML and put it up there.

With hindsight I kind of wish I'd started from scratch rather than rewriting someone else's work (though I do credit them and provide a link to the original, so maybe I won't be hearing from their lawyers just yet). I'm also not sure how useful this kind of document is. Maybe a series of linked articles along the lines of Jonathan Lewis , Howard J Rogers or Adrian Billington 's sites would be better. Also I've heard it argued that nobody will ever agree about layout, so it's more constructive to concentrate on things like modularity, code reuse, interface design, reading the New Features Guide , that kind of thing.

I have thought about ways to make it interactive. Blogger-style comments linked to individual sections might be good, or even (if I could figure out how) a series of "Vote" buttons. A Wiki-style document would be great if I could prevent it from becoming an unstructured free-for-all.

 

[Stew Stryker]

That's the beauty of wikis. Since everyone knows you can revert to a previous version if things get ugly, they tend to "tow the line". You'd definitely want to break up the topics into separate pages. Some wikis have VERY short and specific pages.

Just a thought.