Can you tell us more about the debugger? Can you show us the debugger? What about the debugger? Can you spell ‘debugger’? Why can’t the debugger show X? What is COMPILE WITH DEBUG anyway? Debugger? Skip to Episode V – Starting the Debugger In the past 10 years I have probably heard these questions and countless variations more than any other when it comes to the topic of PL/SQL interactive development environments (IDE.) Debugging seems…
How deep do you go in your software? Do you make it at least 1 click deep? I’m talking about right-clicking with your mouse. Software folks are often accused of hiding things on context menus, but you have to remember that software is engineered and developed by folks that are comfortable with computers – and we just assume everyone knows to ‘right click everywhere.’ You may have noticed something was amiss when you first used…
Updated 9/28/2018 Writing Code is for Suckers Yes, I’m joking, mostly. But if you’re in a tool, and it can help you save time, then why not? Here’s a simple scenario: building a SELECT statement for one or more tables/views. Dragging and dropping tables to the worksheet is a pretty obvious feature – it copies the object names over for you. But did you know you had the option to get more bang for your…
Entity Relationship Diagrams tell a story. An employee is assigned one department. A location can house one or more departments. Jeff doesn’t have a boss because he is ‘the man.’ It can be challenging to understand the nature of your data by simply reading through the list of Foreign Key constraints for a table. Who wants to read this when you can instead see this So how do you go from one to the other?…
This is turning out to be a bit harder to write than I orginially thought. I generally land in the laissez-faire camp, and I know what you’re thinking: “Jeff, we didn’t come here to read French!” Sorry about that, bad habits picked up from 4 years of public education instruction. In terms of American politics, think of me as the Ron Paul of database security folks. Set a user up to be able to do…
Regardless of your role or responsibility, if you work in the database, you’re going to spend a lot of time looking at data. This is usually what will push someone from the command-line to a GUI – the spreadsheet look and feel for browsing tables or query results. Since you’re going to be spending so much time in these grids, let’s make sure you know the basics. I know you’re not writing very many SELECT…
There’s a lot of confusion out there about the absence of a value, also known as NULL. It can cause havoc with your queries if you don’t account for it. Some folks confuse it with a blank space in a string. At least SQL Developer can make one thing a bit easier, interpreting NULLs in a data grid. By default when SQL Developer displays data in a grid, it indicates NULL with {null}. I’m a…
Modeling is cute when you’re in a class and the sample application is for a rotisserie league for fantasy football, or you need a shopping cart ordering system for online retail. You spend a few hours and might come up with several dozen tables. But what about in the real world when you are trying to wrap your head around something with several thousand (or more!) objects? Enter the SubView SubViews allow the user to…
Got a great question off the Twitter-verse this morning from @ApoloDuvalis “..in SD (SQL Developer) you cannot use the same connection in a different command window until the busy command is done or aborted.” I know many of you aren’t familiar with queries that take so long to run that you have to wait on them, but believe me, they are out there! Anytime I need a query that takes more than a few seconds…
I think one of the dirty secrets in the software business is how LITTLE feedback we get from our end-users. You know they are out there though, gritting their teeth, cursing the day someone trusted you with a keyboard and mouse. Some of this software is very expensive to boot, so one would expect these users would be very vocal with their feedback. In actuality, I reckon we only only hear from a very small…