pl/sql best practices

From: martin stanik <martin_stanik_at_hotmail.com>
Date: 31 Jan 2002 09:48:31 -0800
Message-ID: <8f9f2c0b.0201310948.7ce6fac6_at_posting.google.com>

hi.

    Having written a few stored procedures i recognized the need to read some 'clever books'. So i started with oracle pl/sql programming. Very nice, but fat. Actually before i could learn some new clever syntax, i found following rule:

'never write implicit cursors (in other words, never use SELECT INTO syntax).'

But, this i used (copy&pasted from similar code) very often. So, please, could someone explain me, how should a !good! code look like?

My code is here:

---

FUNCTION update_xxx(p_id_constraint IN NUMBER, p_base_condition IN VARCHAR2)   RETURN BOOLEAN IS
  test_id NUMBER;
BEGIN
  SELECT id_constraint INTO test_id
    FROM my_table
    WHERE id_constraint = p_id_constraint;   

  UPDATE my_table
    SET base_condition = p_base_condition     WHERE id_constraint = p_id_constraint;   RETURN TRUE;       EXCEPTION
  WHEN no_data_found THEN
    RETURN FALSE;
END update_xxx;

---

The aim is to make sure, that there was a row updated.

many thanks Received on Thu Jan 31 2002 - 18:48:31 CET