Random outpourings of a software developer
This is how you can call functions in a sql call, such as:
SELECT SYSDATE + 99 FROM DUAL
SQL Server lets you call functions explicitly such as:
SELECT GetDate()
Oracle is clearly insane.
It could be very useful for “correcting” samples.
The more I look at Oracle the less impressive it seems. Hopefully I will find some pleasant features.
The problem is that I need to stay portable.
The big benefit is the lack of lock-in to the windows platform.
This does mean that we can’t guarentee to always have the same version that the customer is using.
Downsides include:
SQL/PLus – this is the best tool that you get out of the box. It may be guarenteed platform portable but it belongs in the 1980’s. You really need TOAD or PL/SQL Developer.
SQL/PLus error handling is painful at best. I am trying to create a 200 table database from a translated script. Some of the tables are not there and it is painful to find what is wrong with the script.
Lack of domains. You can’t specifiy aliases for primative types such as STD_REFERENCE VARCHAR(20)
You can’t return recordsets from stored procedures.
It is a resource hog. It has seriously slowed down my addmitedly old development machine to a crawl.
Benefit:
Lack of the poorly implemented COLLATION issue in SQL Server.
The majoirity of my script conversion is being done using sed.
Hopefully I should be able to perform 90% of the store dprocedure translations with this tool.
This is an article on how to setup the DCOM settings that will allow the SQL Server debugger to work.
sed -e 1,250000d report.tsv > output.txt
Removes the first 1/4 million rows from the given file before passing the output to a file.
This is very useful when a tsv file is 15 Mb – way too big for excel to view.
sed may be old, but it does do the job quickly that very few other tools handle so well.
I have just got a Hello World web service client to run under MonoDevelop. The only sticking point that I had found was forgetting to add System.Web,Services as a reference.
Given that the mono wsdl works that well we have a great opertunity for interoperability. The promise of web services can be realised.
The problem comes with the update web reference option. If you have decorated the proxy with attributes (such as a soap extension) these are lost upon regeneration. There does not seem to be a clean way of managing this. We really need more control of the template than WSDL.exe provides. I am sure that xslt could be used…
.NET 2.0 does promise more control over this generation.
Developer Rants 