Literast

This book doesn't include everything you need to know about PL/SQL. However, it does provide many examples of good coding practice, and it warns you about what to avoid when writing code. We are experienced Oracle professionals who have designed and built many working systems and have writing many thousands of lines of PL/SQL code. The information we provide in this book should whet your appetite for discovering many of the ways in which you can use PL/SQL to communicate with a relational database. We also point you to numerous other handy resources that can help you consolidate and expand your knowledge of this programming language. This book gives you the core information that every PL/SQL developer should know. When we started writing this book, we asked many of our friends and colleagues in the industry what they thought PL/SQL developers should know. If you practice everything we show you in this book, you'll be on your way to becoming an excellent developer. This book is written for people just getting started with the PL/SQL language but does assume that you have some programming language experience. You should understand the basics of computer programming and be familiar with SQL in order to benefit from the information contained in this book. If you have some basic computer programming experiende and are planning to work in the Oracle environment as an application developer, this book is for you. If your goal is to become a database administrator (DBA), it might be a good additional reference, but you should see Oracle 9i For Dummies (latest version as of this writing), by Carol McCullough-Dieter, published by Wiley, or other books about Oracle 10g for information relevant for DBAs.

In this compact book, Steven Feuerstein, widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on the Oracle PL/SQL language, distills his many years of programming, teaching, and writing about PL/SQL into a set of best practices-recommendations for developing successful applications. Covering the latest Oracle release, Oracle Database 11g, Feuerstein has rewritten this new edition in the style of his bestselling Oracle PL/SQL Programming. The text is organized in a problem/solution format, and chronicles the programming exploits of developers at a mythical company called My Flimsy Excuse, Inc., as they write code, make mistakes, and learn from those mistakes-and each other. This book offers practical answers to some of the hardest questions faced by PL/SQL developers, including:

• What is the best way to write the SQL logic in my application code?
• How should I write my packages so they can be leveraged by my entire team of developers?
• How can I make sure that all my team's programs handle and record errors consistently?

Oracle PL/SQL Best Practices summarizes PL/SQL best practices in nine major categories: overall PL/SQL application development; programming standards; program testing, tracing, and debugging; variables and data structures; control logic; error handling; the use of SQL in PL/SQL; building procedures, functions, packages, and triggers; and overall program performance. This book is a concise and entertaining guide that PL/SQL developers will turn to again and again as they seek out ways to write higher quality code and more successful applications. "This book presents ideas that make the difference between a successful project and one that never gets off the ground. It goes beyond just listing a set of rules, and provides realistic scenarios that help the reader understand where the rules come from. This book should be required reading for any team of Oracle database professionals." - Dwayne King, President, KRIDAN Consulting.

Get started with PL/SQL, the built-in language that every Oracle developer and database administrator must know, in Beginning PL/SQL, a fast-paced and example-filled tutorial. Learn from author Don Bales extensive experience to discover the most commonly used aspects of PL/SQL, without wasting time with obscure and obsolete features. Bales takes his 20+ years of experience and a wealth of statistics he's gathered on PL/SQL usage over those years and applies the 80/20 rule: cover what's most needed and used by PL/SQL professionals and avoid what's not necessary! The result is a book that covers all the key features of PL/SQL without wasting your time discussing esoteric and obsolete parts of the language. Learn what really matters, so that you can get to work feeling confident with what you know about PL/SQL. Discover the 20% of PL/SQL that gives you 80% of the bang! Key topics covered include variables and datatypes, executing statements, working with cursors, real-world objects, debugging, testing, and more. Learn how to write production-level, object-oriented PL/SQL. You'll explore relational PL/SQL, but unlike most other books on the subject, this one emphasizes the use of PL/SQLs object-oriented features as well. Work through real examples of using of PL/SQL. You'll learn PL/SQL by applying it to real-world business problems, not by heavy theory. What you?ll learn How important SQL is in PL/SQL How to use PL/SQL in both a relational and object-relational setting How to create maintainable, modular, and reusable PL/SQL program units The importance of testing as you go, and of building a permanent test plan for each module The importance of building debugging capabilities into your code and building a permanent debug facility for each module The importance of documenting as you go, and in the process building a permanent documentation set for your reusable modules How to apply modular PL/SQL to solve real-world problems Who this book is for Anyone who wants to learn how to create stored procedures against an Oracle database using PL/SQL. Programmers developing applications to be deployed against an Oracle database will need PL/SQL to take full advantage of the power Oracle has to offer. Database administrators who wish to implement functionality exposed only via PL/SQL package interfaces will also find this book useful.