Monday, February 06, 2006

Counting Sheep

I'd not seen this Oracle Forums thread before, though it started in 2002 and now has 198 replies. Somebody once asked for some PL/SQL coding standards, someone else offered to email some, and then for ever after gets bombarded with requests from other people saying "Please send same to me at another-idiot-sheep@nobrain.com" Every now and then someone kindly posts a URL to some PL/SQL standards on the web, or points out that these people are just getting their email addresses onto a lot of spam mailing lists, but on and on they go asking for a copy to be sent direct to them. It's surprisingly funny.

10 comments:

William Robertson said...

It's been one of my favourites for years.

I've asked for a copy too, but it hasn't arrived yet.

William Robertson said...

I notice at one point someone posts a link to this online standards document. Hands up, anyone who uses that layout...

3360 said...

The mysterious standards are now attaining mythic proportions. They have somehow eveloved into Oracle's Internal PL/SQL Coding standards. No doubt they will soon become Official and Top Secret also.

William Robertson said...

I noticed that. I find it rather hard to believe that the authors of DBMS_UTILITY.GET_PARAMETER_VALUE were working to any sort of standards.

OraWTFGuy said...

Anyone following William's link to the online coding standards would have come across this little gem. If this wasn't written in 1997, I'd have given it its own post:-

All PL/SQL scripts should contain a header (or for improvement in execution time for anonymous PL/SQL code, a footer, too)...

3360 said...

I'd also like to nominate this forums thread where someone has denormalized the dreaded EAV 'data model' into a single table. All arguments are dismissed on the basis that EAV has three tables and the one table version is an improvement that does not have any of the drawbacks being pointed out.

http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=360066

(I would submit it to the oraclewtf address but my mail is complaining because it doesn't contain an @)

William Robertson said...

Wow, I'm rather speechless after reading that "No it's not an EAV design because we only have one table instead of three and so actually it is a concrete elephant" OTN thread.

oraclewtf@bigfoot.com should contain an "@". Doesn't it?

Tony Andrews said...

Now the epidemic is spreading across the web - see the 5th response to this blog entry:

http://radiofreetooting.blogspot.com/2006/02/how-do-you-pronounce-oracle.html

OraWTFGuy said...

Here we go again...

http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=366756&tstart=0

William Robertson said...

It's the end of an era - looks like the thread was deleted some time yesterday. I must say I'm sorry to see it go, The steady parade of astonishingly stupid seekers of enlightenment was somehow reassuring.