Avoid standalone procedures and functions and always use packages to construct your application. That is one of the “best practices” when developing Oracle PL/SQL programs.

Of course, as an Oracle PL/SQL programmer you must be familiar with PL/SQL packages and you know how powerful they are in organizing your functions and enhancing the maintenance of your […]

Since my last post about the undocumented pragmas in Oracle, I have found more information about the FIPSFLAG pragma directive and more specifically about the FIPS part of it. Jens commented about the existence of a session parameter FLAGGER and its possible relationship with FIPSFLAG and FIPS. After a bit of searching, here is what […]

A few weeks ago I blogged about PRAGMAs in PL/SQL. As you all know, as of the current release of PL/SQL, we have 4 documented pragma directives: AUTONOMOUS_TRANSACTION, RESTRICT_REFERENCES, EXCEPTION_INIT and SERIALLY_REUSABLE.

Karl posted a comment to draw my attention to the fact that in the SYS.STANDARD PL/SQL package, Oracle uses three additional undocumented pragma directives: […]

What is a pragma? A pragma is compiler directive. Pragmas are processed at compile time, not at run time. They pass information to the compiler.

The pragma notion is not limited to PL/SQL. Other programming languages have pragmas too. Answers.com defines a pragma, in the context of Computer Science, as:

A message written into […]