Are one or more usage examples enough to specify the requirements for something? For example:
rtrim('123000', '0'); would return '123'
No, as can be seen here: Oracle 8, SQL: RTRIM for string manipulation is not working as expected (Stackoverflow)
When I read that question I thought of TDD (Test Driven Development), something I think I should be doing more of. As said here, however, “Are tests sufficient documentation? Very likely not, but they do form an important part of it.”
I’ve seen unit test cases used as a form of documentation. Generally they could be useful for this – to tell part of the story – but if they only consist of “enter this, expect that”, they will never be good enough to replace requirements documentation.
Footnote: How about the source code – is that sufficient as documentation? In one sense, yes – the source code is the best documentation of what the system does now. What’s lacking, however, is documentation of the business requirements – and this gap can be huge (see e.g. Agile Development and Requirements Management).
I’ve enjoyed reading and participating in StackOverflow for over a year now.
With the introduction of Area51, there is now the possibility of starting a new Q&A site for all things Oracle – as pointed out by Rob Van Wijk and Gary Myers. Sure there are other fora such as OTN, but they don’t have the kinds of features that make SO fun and self-moderating. SO is more like a cross between a Q&A forum and a wiki, with the addition of a democratic system of reputation points that allow good questions and answers to bubble up to the top.
If you agree, please head over to Area 51 – Oracle Databases and Follow it to voice your agreement.
In my daily reading these two articles came fairly close together, and I have a strong feeling they are describing exactly the same project. *
From one side of the fence: A total rewrite: costly, time-consuming, but worth it?
“Our CMS was developed using Active Server Pages, and consisted of around 80,000 lines of VBScript code.”
“as we continued to develop the rest of the framework, we saw that it took a lot longer than anticipated”
From the other side: The Homegrown CMS
“If one were to create a list of adjectives to describe this monstrosity, “stable,” “reliable,” and “accurate” would be strikingly absent.”
“…nearly 200 tables (mostly imported from Microsoft Access) and not a single stored procedure. Boolean-type values were represented as a CHAR(5) field, holding possible values of ‘true’, ‘false’, or NULL…
“There were also no indexes. Nor any primary key columns… For inserts, an ID was assigned via in-line SQL by requesting the Max(ID) field of any particular table and adding 1.”
My point of view: this sounds like a good counter-example to the (very good, but general) advice offered by Joel Spolsky: don’t rewrite from scratch.
* EDIT: Vidar Langberget has advised that these are not the same project, proving that I’m not such a great prognosticator 😐
I’m looking for someplace that will host our website, one that supports Oracle Apex.
A simple Google query came up with www.apexwebhosting.net, but I was sorely disappointed. You’d think with a name like that they’d support more than just MySQL and Access, but no.
I’m still looking… the list at http://apex.oracle.com/pls/otn/f?p=24793:11:0 seems promising.
It was great to catch up with former colleagues at the conference today. As I go from site to site I’m gradually collecting more and more former colleagues and it’s great to hear how they’re going and what they’re working on.
Howard Ong gave a good review of Oracle’s new Data Modeller. Sounds like it’s got a lot of promise – but it’s very new and misses some features (e.g. support for functions, procedures with parameters, packages, and DDL change script generation) that I’d expect in an Oracle CASE tool.
Ray Tindall with Penny Cookson showed how a variety of javascript libraries (Apexlib, ExtJS, JQuery) can be integrated into APEX, and what features they provide. Personally I’d prefer to wait until they come out of the box in APEX 4.0, but for now the options available look good.
I was happy to see a good level of interest in Python at my talk after lunch. If you’re here because you want to have a peek at all the slides I skipped, you can view or download it from here [Python_and_Oracle_Fast.pdf].
Unfortunately I had to leave soon after that to pick up my car from the autoelectrician, tomorrow I should be able to stay all day.
Jeffrey Kemp
10 November 2009
AUSOUG /
“A woman asks her husband, a programmer, to go shopping:
– Dear, please, go to the nearby grocery store to buy some bread. If they have eggs, buy 6.
– O.K., hun.
Twenty minutes later the husband comes back bringing 6 loaves of bread. His wife is flabbergasted:
– Dear, why on earth did you buy 6 loaves of bread?
– They had eggs.”
Source (deleted)
