Andrej Koelewijn

Steve Muench has posted a link on his blog to the Oracle UIX roadmap. UIX components will become JSF components in the next release. And current ADF UIX applications will automaticall be upgraded to the JSF architecture.

First time i looked at the java standard tag library, i wondered what the use was of the sql tags. You shouldn’t really be using these in any serious web application, as they don’t really follow MVC. SQL statements belong in DAO’s, OR-mappers, EJB’s or maybe in Struts actions but not in a jsp page.

However, recently i’ve started using them and they turn out to be really useful. I’m doing quite a lot of batch related oracle work, run large jobs, with no good ui to monitor what’s going on. So i have a lot of queries, usually embedded in shell scripts, which will show me what’s going on.

Now with these sql tags, you can just copy past all your sql scripts in a jsp page. Takes less than five minutes, no need to write java classes, no need to start a java ide. Now you can view the output of your sql scripts in a browser.

Having your sql scripts produce html helps because it’s easier to navigate between different scripts. No need to run one query, find the relevant id’s and then run a different query with the id’s you just found. And you can just copy past the url of the output when instant messaging with collegues.

Went to see Steven Feuerstein talk on pl/sql collections today. Pl/sql collections can be usefull in certain situations, and steven had some interesting examples. He started with a quick overview on pl/sql and showed some examples. He then talked a bit about bulk updates to speed up pl/sql code. By reducing the number of context switches between the pl/sql engine and sql engine you can achieve quite impressive performance enhancements. He said that when doing 5 or more inserts at the same time it already pays to use bulk inserts. Ofcourse, using pl/sql tables means that you’ll be using more memory, so you can’t just do everything in pl/sql tables. Problem is that it’s not easy to determine how many rows you should process in a bulk statement.

Next he showed a more complicated use of pl/sql collections. This example is documented on otn. His example is used to detect problematic overloaded procedures and functions. He reads the all_arguments table and stores the data in four nested pl/sql tables. This makes his code easier to read and maintain.

Finally, steven demonstrated a new tool he’s working on: Swyg. The idea is that current pl/sql ide’s do not do enough to help the programmer improve quality. More code should be reused, so the tool will find everything that you can reuse, and it will generated code based on templates. Nothing to download yet, but expected in about a month.

I think reuse would already greatly improve if it would be easier to find code in your database that you can use. For example, i’m currently programming extensions to an oracle applications database. So quite often i’ll browse through all the packages and tables in toad’s schema browser looking for things to (re)use. Using toad’s schema browser on an oracle applications database is a pain. Very slow to load all the packages. And then, how do you find the relevant code?

Also, the idea of code generation is nice, but i would prefer to be able to do this from a uml tool. For example by using poseidon and andromda, to generate tables, packages and unit tests.

Steven’s presentations and code can be downloade from the minmaxplsql website.