Chacham's Journal: Oracle: (Another) Tom Kyte rant

Tom Kyte has another Blog entry ranting about bad practices. Indeed, his personal blog is full of them.

The main part being the self-noted hyperbole

I still wish....

        * when others would be removed from plsql
        * triggers would be deprecated and removed
        * autonomous transactions would start just raising errors
        * literals in sql would raise an error

Perhaps if he says it enough times, people will get the message.

WHEN OTHERS is bad enough, and *severely* overused. Why mask a perfectly good EXCEPTION, that will say when and where the error happened? Especially, as he points out, the useless WHEN OTHERS THEN NULL;.

I don't think TRIGGERs should be deprecated, though i do think that most people who use them should be sent to re-education camps. It is sad when people put procedural logic in them.

TRIGGERs are hidden and usually doing what a PROCEDURE should be doing. Also, it is usually added as a kludge, in general inefficient, and then forgotten, and we have something that should not be.

Use TRIGGERs for ad-hoc debugging and DB maintenance (history, logging who/when), not much else.

He's bright

[stoolpigeon]

I love to read his blog. It's helped me a ton of times - and stuff like that I love because I'd rather learn the easy way.

Keep developers away from triggers

[Bill Dog]

Esp. Java/younger devs, who in my experience tend to want to take all kinds of henious shortcuts, maybe because they really don't enjoy programming and just want to get it over with as soon as possible. Or something.

At my previous job some of them advocated using triggers to save them from having to write delete code. The end result would have been a bunch of insert/updates in the code for when the user created some "object" (in our application's problem domain), to update all the tables that together conce

Re:

[Chacham]

Thanx for sharing. Misery loves company. :P