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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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PL/SQL koolaid 3 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Of course PL/SQL has builtin hashes. It's a table with two columns.

    No I don't know whether I'm being sarcastic or not either.
    • DECLARE /* requires Oracle9i or later */
          TYPE hashtable_t IS TABLE OF RAW(128) INDEX BY VARCHAR2(12);
          string_hash hashtable_t;
      BEGIN
          string_hash('observation') := '6C6F6F6B73206C696B65206275696C742D696E2068617368696E6720746F206D65';
          string_hash('signature') := '62696C6C2070726962796C';
      END;
      /

      • Hi, Bill. Welcome to the site. I'm honored to have attracted your attention.

        Thanks for the books! I'm learning at breakneck pace. The combined experience you and Steve bring to bear is priceless. I recently completed Learning Oracle PL/SQL and was thrilled at all the things I was exposed to; many of those items I would probably never have seen. (And if you search my recent journal entries, you'll find one that amazed some of my coworkers and made me rather popular.)

        Thanks for the hash example. I see hashes are indeed built in to Oracle, but they are not built in in the same way they are in languages like Perl, Python, or TCL. I was really only using Perl's hash tables, built into the language from the beginning, as an example of a great language feature.

        I hope you didn't find anything I said here harsh; it wasn't intended that way. You and Steve show incredible mastery of PL/SQL, but as we all know, PL/SQL hasn't always had the best way of doing things. I can see references particularly in Feuerstein's writings about the days when DBMS_OUTPUT didn't even exist. You guys have sunk into every nook and cranny of the language, working around problems and showing how to get real work done.

        I used to work with a dBase IV expert. He was never a trained programmer, but he worked in dBase for years until he could do anything he wanted. At the time of his retirement, he'd spent a couple of years slowly discovering how much easier a lot of what he was doing was in shell script. Going through them chronologically, his programs show a progression as he works with better and better tools. Learning shell script made him a better dBase programmer. I would love to have seen where he would have gotten if he hadn't retired. ;)

        I've got some reading material I'd like to point you at, by a Lisp programmer named Paul Graham. I don't program Lisp, myself, but I want to some day. I keep hearing better and better things about it that make me know that mastering it will make me better at what I do, even if I don't use it directly [catb.org]. Here's an essay about running a business with Lisp programming as the prime product [paulgraham.com] by Paul Graham. Very interesting.

        --
        J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
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