Comments on: ★ Why WHEN OTHERS THEN RAISE Can Be Harmful

By: Eddie Awad

Eddie Awad — Sun, 03 May 2009 01:40:10 +0000

@Mihajlo I have just dug up your comment from the spam queue. I have no idea why it got stuck there.

You're right, DBMS_UTILITY.FORMAT_ERROR_BACKTRACE can be very useful ... when used. I even wrote a post about it a while ago.

By: Eddie Awad

Eddie Awad — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 03:35:19 +0000

@Justis LOL!

By: Justis

Justis — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 19:21:00 +0000

Amen. I think it is a manifestation of masochism or schadenfreude, depending on the individual.

By: Mihajlo Tekic

Mihajlo Tekic — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:42:56 +0000

Hi Eddie,

I agree that WHEN OTHERS THEN RAISE hides the bug. However if used with DBMS_UTILITY.FORMAT_ERROR_BACKTRACE (available from 10.1.x) and DBMS_UTILITY.FORMAT_ERROR_STACK, one can still get the line where the error occurred.

Example

SQL>  DECLARE
  2       l_var   varchar2 (30);
  3    BEGIN
  4       SELECT   object_name
  5         INTO   l_var
  6         FROM   all_objects
  7        WHERE   ROWNUM <= 2;
  8    EXCEPTION
  9        WHEN OTHERS
 10        THEN
 11      DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(DBMS_UTILITY.format_error_stack());
 12      DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(DBMS_UTILITY.format_error_backtrace());
 13           RAISE;
 14*   END;
SQL> /
ORA-01422: exact fetch returns more than requested number of rows

ORA-06512: at line 4 <== DBMS_UTILITY.FORMAT_ERROR_BACKTRACE output

DECLARE
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-01422: exact fetch returns more than requested number of rows
ORA-06512: at line 13


SQL>