2022-01-14

Finding Wrong Hints

Introduction I have used the Oracle Database for many years. And I use hints. For experiments, but also in production code. There are cases when you know more than the Oracle Database. For example about the cardinality of a data source or the number of result rows to process or the number […]
2020-09-07

Highlight Hints in SQL Developer

Introduction In this blog post, I explain how you can configure your SQL Developer to highlight hints and distinguish them from ordinary comments. The SQL Language Reference for Oracle Database 19c defines hints as follows: Hints are comments in a SQL statement that pass instructions to the Oracle Database optimizer. The optimizer […]
2020-04-26

Syntax Highlighting With SQL Developer

Introduction A customer asked me if it is possible to show unused identifiers in SQL Developer. Since there is no PL/SQL compile warning for that, you might be tempted to say no. But you can always use PL/SQL Cop for static code analysis. Guideline G-1030 deals with variables and constants and guideline […]
2018-03-11

PL/SQL Cop for SonarQube 7.0

For the last two months, my Trivadis colleague Daniel Schutzbach and I have been working on the PL/SQL Cop plugin for SonarQube. The goal was to support the most recent SonarQube versions 5.6 LTS, 6.7 LTS and 7.0. Dani was doing the heavy lifting and my job was testing and minor bug […]
2017-12-17

How to Prove That Your SmartDB App Is Secure

If you are guarding your data behind a hard shell PL/SQL API as Bryn Llewellyn, Toon Koppelaars and others recommend, then it should be quite easy to prove, that your PL/SQL application is secured against SQL injection attacks. The basic idea is 1) that you do not expose data via tables nor views […]
2017-10-15

Entity Relationship Model for PL/Scope

Today I found a sketch of an ERD from last year when I looked at the new features of PL/Scope in version 12.2. It looked a bit complicated and also wrong. So, I decided to refactor it using SQL Developer Data Modeler and share the result. You find the model in the […]
2017-10-14

Limitations of PL/Scope and How to Deal with Them

My first car was a Renault R5 TX. The motor cooling of this car was really bad. On a hot summer day, it was simply not possible to drive slowly in high traffic without overheating the engine. To cool the engine you could either stop the car, open the front lid and […]
2017-09-24

Continuous Code Quality for PL/SQL with Docker

In this blog post, I show step-by-step how to set up a continuous code quality inspection environment for a PL/SQL project hosted on GitHub. I’m going to use a Docker container for SonarQube and another container for Jenkins. Here is the table of contents of the major steps. In the summary of […]
2017-07-11

Simplify the Use of PL/Scope in SQL Developer

In this post, I showed how to do some code analysis with PL/Scope and how the views and packages of the plscope-utils might simplify this task. However, these views and packages are based on dba_* views and it is sometimes not that easy to get such privileges for an additional user in a non-personal database instance. […]
2017-05-14

Get Ready for Oracle 12.2

The Oracle Database 12.2 grammar is now supported in the most current versions of PL/SQL Cop, PL/SQL Cop for SQL Developer, PL/SQL Cop for SonarQube and PL/SQL Analyzer. The following screenshot shows a query based on analytic views. Have a look at the full example on Oracle Live SQL, if you are interested in analytic views. […]