How’s this for a horror story? Adding a new feature to a 6,000 line and 100% undocumented stored procedure in a 20+ year old Oracle database.

And on the 8th day, God created OracleDataAccess, so that mankind shall understand despair.

Fuck PL/SQL. Fuck Oracle. They're so big they can afford to deliver the most user-unfriendly experience i've ever seen.

I'm interviewing with the data architect in two weeks' time, a self-proclaimed ninja. The chap has done PL/SQL development on SQL Server 2008 according to his LinkedIn profile. Yeah, okaaay...

(I highly recommend to you to not read this, it's just something that I had been wanting to take off my head; seriously, if you want to read it, do it at your own risk, because it will be a huge waste of your time)

Oracle Academy is the worst crappy attempt from a Corporation to create a learning platform.

The directive and academic personnel of my faculty decided that it could be a good idea to teach SQL and PL/SQL during whatever online classes will last with Oracle Academy, and I truly strongly believe (including most of my friends and classmates) that it's one of the worst ideas that could be done.

At that platform you simply don't learn shit, you read page by page of shitty PPT-like PDF presentations (that most of those are from a decade ago and other from 5 years ago) that are a pain in the ass to read due to how poorly formatted they are or how it explains badly certain concepts due to how badly made some explaining examples are, and then at each section of the "Learning Course" I have to do a Quiz that asks theorical questions and tells you to make certain code reviews to see if something is wrong or not (also which they are just alike the presentations, poorly formatted, up to the point that those have many syntax errors that end up consufing anyone a lot) and the main problem with the quizes is that also the Oracle's PL/SQL Docs are so fucking badly made, that I have to check PDF by PDF and page by page the concept that I just forgot to see how to answer the goddamn question; I mean, there are Doc pages that are way better structured and obviusly external to Oracle, but not even those pages fully cover certain SQL and PL/SQL concepts.

Seriously though, who could be so fucking ill-minded to create a shittyful learning platform and not try to fucking improve nor enhance it at least every 2 fucking years, so the goddamn "learning" process isn't that stressful.

What are your thoughts about PL/SQL?

I once saw a DBA using two for loops in PL/SQL to join two tables. I wonder if he knew about the "alternative" way to do that...

Wrote a PLSQL exam yesterday.
Had to do it on a sheet of paper instead of using Eclipse (which we normally use in lessons)

My brain :
kernel panic - not syncing

It was the worst exam I’ve ever taken😅

TL;DR Is there a hackerrank for Oracle PL/SQL?

At my work, we do not get raises, we only get promotions. Promotions are applied for, and then interviewed for. Highest score (plus maybe some managerial bias) wins.

33% of the questions revolve around PL/SQL (and just Oracle DB in general) and the better you explain yourself, the better you score.

Tutorials just don't do it for me. They're boring. I want something interactive. While it doesn't need to be competitive and challenging like hackerrank, I'm looking for something gamified like hackerrank where I can see other people and learn the technology intimately so I can climb the ranks at my company faster.

Does anyone know of something sort of along the lines? All suggestions appreciated.

Not really most painful, but definitely most painful of the recent bunch..
// yup, a bunch.. I've managed to fuck up a little on every thing I did that day :/ little friday the 13th for me, especially as I went on sick leave the next day and had to fixup my fuckups with a friggin migrane..

Anyways, I was fixing fallback to some default value in plsql.. before it didn't check what the input format was and simply relied on certain format, parsed that and converted to number..threw an error, duh!

I fixed it somehow elegantly to check with regex if the format is as expected and if not default to xy value..and if format is as expected to parse out the number..except that when I copied (or typed?! for the sake of me, I cannot recall how the fuck I managed to fuck this up) over the code to the package I didn't see additional [ at the begining, so everything went to the default.. Most embarrassing part is I commented everything, how it should work, use cases, what the input was and what was expected output..and failed to see the friggin extra [..
It was fixed easily, the extra [ stood out later when I saw the code, but it bothers me how I managed to overlook that in the first place. I think I need a vacation.. but have to fix other fuckups first.. :/

I live under a rock.. sooo notepad++ for me..or even a paper notebook..

Joke aside, depends what kind of code I'm writing or what I'm doing with it.. if I have to analyse what some part does and modify it I actually do take it from VS to np++ to check & write.. same for PLSQL.. not sure why I prefer doing this the 'hard' way, but it suits me.. after I'm finished I'm pasting it back and correct possible typos and so on..

P.S. I'm also one of those weirdos who have no problem writing exams on paper..

Is there any reason why the actual fuck the OracleDataAccess Driver for C# returns everything either as decimal or string else its a TypeConversionError? Why does it even have the functionality to return an int if that can literally never happen?