Hello Oracle List, Can anyone suggest a reference where I can review some of the Oracle PL/SQL "built-in" packages and functions which are slated for deprecation or discontinuation for future releases of Oracle? I feel fortunate that most of my programming techniques from my experience with older releases still seems workable, but it would be great to review and plan for how my PL/SQL should look in the immediate or near future.
In his books, Author and Oracle programmer Stephen Feurstein suggests building abstractions to many low-level and built-in Oracle PL/SQL features exactly for this reason. Should Oracle decide to change or discontinue it or if you port your applications to a different release, you can rewrite your internal API's to adapt and potentially large code bases can continue to survive with minimal maintenance headaches. Some of you software developers may even be able to make your code portable enough to smoothly convert (gasp!) to another database platform altogether (SQLServer, Sybase, MySQL, etc.) I recently reviewed one such example called the "Quest Error Manager" project, a freeware PL/SQL utility distributed by Quest software, the publishers of the TOAD software suite. The Error Manager project tackles the problems of PL/SQL exception handling under a very complex but flexible framework and avoids direct calls to Oracle specific PL/SQL features everywhere except in the lowest level private functions and procedures of the API package. Even simple calls to functions such as "dbms_output" are encapsulated in a wrapper procedure with additional features added on for better usability. It seemed a little bloated for such a deceivingly "simple" task such as exception handling, but it definitely got me thinking about the whole abstraction concept. As another example, several months ago, I worked on a PL/SQL based application written by SungardHE. Their application, though certified for only Oracle platforms, was written entirely avoiding Oracle specific constructs (perhaps in the hope of porting it for customers with other database systems). For example, something as simple as an Oracle sequence was avoided. Instead, a master table of sequence numbers was queried and incremented every time a new sequence number was needed... which I suspect may pose a problem in a distributed computing environment or a performance bottleneck since the sequencing process involves a discrete DML transaction every time it is needed. Anyways, if any of you out there know of pointers to some good references for "deprecated" PL/SQL I'd be glad to know. Also if there's anyone out there who might enjoy jumping in and contributing to this general discussion, please feel free to respond... Thanks! Rich Pascual -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Oracle PL/SQL" group. To post to this group, send email to Oracle-PLSQL@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to oracle-plsql-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Oracle-PLSQL?hl=en
