Demise of the Perth AUSOUG Conference?

Got an email this morning from the Australian Oracle User Group that this year the AUSOUG/OAUG “Oracle with 20:20 Foresight” conference will be co-located with the InSync conference, which is held in Melbourne on 16-17 August.

Initially I thought, “what, no conference for Perth?” Thankfully, though, they will also hold Oracle with 20:20 Foresight in Perth as well, 22-23 November. Phew!



A good entry-level interview question

I think this would make a reasonable question for would-be database developers:

What are the differences between the following statements?

UPDATE mytable SET mycolumn = NULL;
ALTER TABLE mytable MODIFY (mycolumn NULL);

If they can’t answer this correctly, they don’t get to stage two.


Lesson learned today

Comment out all “DROP TABLE” commands in my scripts.

(I accidentally hit F5 when the focus was in the wrong window – which happened to contain a “DROP TABLE / CREATE TABLE” script – my Toad session goes and happily drops the table that I’d been gradually accumulating statistics into for the past 3 days – and no, there’s no flashback table in 9i)

At least I kept all my scripts – rerunning them all now…


Please, hard-code your literals

As Feuerstein says,


We all know that hard-coding is a bad thing in software. But most developers think of hard-coding simply as typing a literal value into your program whenever you need it.

So what’s wrong with doing this? Nothing – as long as the value is never going to change. But what’s the chance of that happening? In fact, what’s the chance of anything staying the same (never changing) in our application requirements and resulting code?

Almost nil.

I agree with most of what Steven says in this post, except for the “Almost nil” part. In my experience, developers who have slavishly converted all literal values in their applications to constants have made life much more difficult for subsequent maintenance and performance tuning.

I would contend that literal values should be hard-coded throughout the code when those values will not change, because they cannot change. The main example of this kind of value is that of hidden magical ID numbers, that crop up especially often in database designs featuring any kind of EAV pattern. These designs usually feature some kind of metadata table, e.g.:

PROPERTYTYPES (
  propertyid,
  code,
  description,
  datatype, length, etc.)

and sprinkled throughout the codebase, like sand in your toddler’s nappy after a trip to the beach, are statements like this:

SELECT value INTO custname
FROM propertyvalues
WHERE entityid = p1
AND propertyid = cNAME;

(where cNAME is a constant that happens to be set to 30456 or something like that)

It gets worse when they need more than one property about an entity:

SELECT a.value, b.value, c.value
INTO custname, custphone, custaddress
FROM propertyvalues a, propertyvalues b, propertyvalues c
WHERE a.entityid = p1 AND b.entityid = p1 and c.entityid = p1
AND a.propertyid = cNAME
AND b.propertyid = cPHONE
AND c.propertyid = cADDRESS;

Someone might say, “that’s good, isn’t it? The hardcoded literal values have been stored once and once only in the constant declarations, and they can be used everywhere. If we want to change a property ID we can change it in one place and everything still works.”

Wrong – for two reasons.

Firstly, it’s not just one place – if you change the property ID, you have to also change the data in all the tables that point to that property. You also have to change code in that frontend UI that can’t read those constants, or in that external process that inexplicably was written with its own logic around those particular ID values (and search-and-replace won’t work because they’ve written some braindead code like this: if propertyid > 30453 & propertyid < 30458 { ... }). The larger, more complex and widespread the codebase, the more it’s just not going to change.

Secondly, WHY? Why would you ever want to change these IDs? Much preferable to hard-code those ID values everywhere. If you stick to using constants where it makes sense (like the “maximum salary” that Steven had in his excellent example), then your hard-coded literals will tell future developers one important and life-preserving message:

“Do not change this code.”