There hasn't been much cool going on to blog about lately.
At my job they're asking me to work on a PL/SQL
application. My Oracle background is fairly strong but
this is something I've never had much interest in before.
I've worked on a few applications where in my view
the PL/SQL people got out of control and migrated too
much of the functionality of the application into the
database and that is kind of how I feel about this
application.
Anyway I spent the day today getting remote debugging
working in SQL Developer (a cool tool I've been using
for years) and trying to step into the procedure I made
changes to. It's frustrating, though, the procedure
gets called from a package and it seems like the
debugger will step into procedures that are part of the
package but not a procedure that is outside of the
package.
I think I'd like this better if there was an IDE that could
provide all the support for PL/SQL development that
Eclipse provides for Java. I've been using 'search' a lot
because there's nothing to just click on a procedure call
and take you to the procedure definition. The code
isn't even indented consistently.
All the other developers on the team use TOAD which
is a great program but it only runs on Windows.
I don't think either TOAD or SQL Developer has CVS
integration, so there's a common pitfall of the developers
coding directly in the database but neglecting to update
their checked in code. Also, performing a database build
seems to be a bit of a black art... it's not fully automated
and there are only a couple of guys on the team who
know how to do it. Consistent and reproducible builds
do not just happen automatically once you start using
Ant or Maven or whatever but my sense is that Java
is way ahead when it comes to this.
