While working on the second edition of this book, I've been traveling to countries in Latin America and Europe, doing lots of presentations on best practices for PL/SQL. And in every one of these presentations, I've asked the attendees the following question:
How many of you have any guidelines for how, when, and where you should write SQL in your PL/SQL code? For example, a piece of paper with a few dos and don'ts?
And in seminar after seminar, I am shocked at the number of hands that are raised. Or should I say, not raised? In a group of 100, perhaps 2 or 3 will raise their hands. In a group of 50 or 60, most commonly not a single person raises her hand.
I think I know why—and you probably do, too, since you should be asking yourself the same question and thinking about why you too are saying, "No, no standards for SQL."
PL/SQL developers (and their managers) take SQL completely for granted—they don't really give it a second thought, when it is written inside a PL/SQL program. The reason for this is that Oracle Corporation has made it so easy to write SQL statements inside PL/SQL. There is no need for JDBC, ODBC, or any other intermediate layer of code. Just write the SQL you need! Right there! Over and over again!
Well, I think that this casual, thoughtless approach to writing SQL is one of the biggest problems and challenges we face in our PL/SQL code. Consider the impact of SQL statements in both the writing and the managing of our code base: ...
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