Comments on: What you Ought to Know About CASE in Oracle PL/SQL

By: Not Tom

Not Tom — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:53:33 +0000

Surprise surprise, Tom wrote a snarky response without reading the post.

This article and the poster on asktom are talking about CASE in Oracle PL/SQL. Tom is only talking about CASE in Oracle SQL, where you never need the ELSE.

Bottom line is, you'll only get the CASE_NOT_FOUND exception when omitting the else clause from a case "statement" in PL/SQL.

By: Reader

Reader — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 01:20:23 +0000

Seems like an unknown subtlety to even Tom:

http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/asktom/f?p=100:11:0::::P11_QUESTION_ID:67073167580253

By: Eddie Awad

Eddie Awad — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 03:21:29 +0000

Glad you learned something new guys. I also learned something new today thanks to Pete, the Duff's device. I had to check it out. Very interesting.

After my limited reading about it, and If I understand it correctly, I do not believe that Duff's device can be simulated in PL/SQL using CASE because there is no "break" in PL/SQL as there is in C. Moreover, unlike C, CASE breaks automatically at the end of a positive WHEN condition block (continues after the END CASE).

Now, there is this new feature in 11g, CONTINUE, but I do not see that it will make any difference in this case.

By: Sidhu

Sidhu — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 17:05:50 +0000

Good one Eddie

Learned a new thing

Sidhu

By: Pete Finnigan

Pete Finnigan — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 14:09:08 +0000

Nice post Eddie, it would be interesting; if i had any spare time..:-) to see if Duffs device would work with PL/SQL case contructs as they do with C.

cheers

Pete

By: Karl

Karl — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 06:43:47 +0000

oh! this was new to me the differnet behavior of a searched case expression and a statement. Great Karl