Re: Undocumented Oracle Functions

You probably did mention "not for applications" and I just missed it.

Don't get me wrong, I think they are great for things like break fixes, etc but even then with caution. One concern with the DBE/break fix route would be undocumented behaviors that don't show up during testing. I've seen this before where I've used some feature and lo and behold it seems to work right during testing (ie: the answers come out right) but when put to the test there are subtle errors in how it works. I'd be concerned that if used for a break fix (if the fix were, say, a data fix) that you might encounter some bug in the undocumented feature.

Of course, this type of situation *never* occurs with the documented features, does it? Parallel processing comes immediatley and painfully to mind from the past ..... :-)

Don't mean to sound negative at all, just cautious (what *has* happened to that rebel in me?). The technoweenie in me loves these things!! :)

Cheers!!

RF

 Robert G. Freeman
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• Original Message ---- From: Jared Still <jkstill_at_gmail.com> To: Robert Freeman <robertgfreeman_at_yahoo.com> Cc: Oracle-L Freelists <oracle-l_at_freelists.org> Sent: Thursday, October 2, 2008 10:26:24 AM Subject: Re: Undocumented Oracle Functions

On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 5:19 PM, Robert Freeman <robertgfreeman_at_yahoo.com> wrote:

...
I hate them from a manager point of view. Nothing makes me cringe more than thinking some developer would use such functions in production code only to find that they no longer work after the next upgrade since they are not "supported" or "documented".

I did mention that these shouldn't be used in an application.

Perfectly acceptable in DBA scripts though IMO, as long as it's something that you can afford to have break until you can fix the problem caused by an undocumented function changing between releases.

I particularly liked sys_op_vecbit.

--

Jared Still
Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist
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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Thu Oct 02 2008 - 11:47:27 CDT