Oracle PL/SQL Programming, 5th Edition

Go Forth and Modularize!

PL/SQL has a long history of establishing the foundation of code for large and complex applications. Companies run their businesses on PL/SQL-based applications, and they use these applications for years and even decades. To be quite honest, you don’t have much of a chance of success building (and certainly maintaining) such large-scale, mission-critical systems without an intimate familiarity with (application of) the modularization techniques available in PL/SQL.

This book should provide you with some solid pointers and a foundation on which to build your code. There is still much more for you to learn, especially the awesome range of the supplied packages that Oracle Corporation provides with various tools and the database itself, such as DBMS_RLS (for row-level security) and UTL_TCP (for TCP-related functionality.

Behind all that technology, however, I strongly encourage you to develop a firm commitment to modularization and reuse. Develop a deep and abiding allergy to code redundancy and to the hardcoding of values and formulas. Apply a fanatic’s devotion to the modular construction of true black boxes that easily plug-and-play in and across applications.

You will then find that you spend more time in the design phase of your development and less time debugging your code (joy of joys!). Your programs will be more readable and more maintainable. They will stand as elegant testimonies to your intellectual integrity. You will be the most popular kid in the ...