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Re: tools for PL/SQL development

From: Daniel Morgan <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu>
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2004 10:31:33 -0800
Message-ID: <1077301853.750323@yasure>


Mark C. Stock wrote:

> similar things were said about the steam engine...

Bad analogy. If I was arguing use 3x5 cards then it would be valid.

> the advise to stick with SQL*Plus until you know what you're doing is good
> for only about the first 10 minutes of your Oracle career

Strongly disagree.

> yes, you need to know how SQL*Plus works, and you need to understand the
> what the SQL is doing, but where is the advantage to using vi/notepad and
> SHOW ERRORS rather than an honest-to-goodness programmer's editor that
> highlights keywords and syntax (so you can easily see where you forgot to
> terminate a string) and highlights the error locations?

> ;-{ mcs

The advantages are substantial. I tried letting my students use TOAD, SQL*Navigator, etc. little learning takes place. They don't learn to use their brains and their eyes. They expect the GUI to do it for them. And it does if you are talking about syntactic errors but those are the easy errors. If you are still making syntax errors after your first few months you need to consider a career change. Yes we all make typos but even SHOW ERROR catches those.

The far larger issue is logic errors and those can not be caught with any tool and require training the human brain. Something I have not observed when people rely on GUIs.

-- 
Daniel Morgan
http://www.outreach.washington.edu/ext/certificates/oad/oad_crs.asp
http://www.outreach.washington.edu/ext/certificates/aoa/aoa_crs.asp
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace 'x' with a 'u' to reply)
Received on Fri Feb 20 2004 - 12:31:33 CST

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