Posted by DA Morgan on 06/05/05 21:05

Serge Rielau wrote:

> Not his point. The point is that the prorietary synatx also has
> proprietary semantics. So why teach what Oracle discourages?

Normally I encourage that students, and professionals, follow Oracle's
advice. For example when Oracle said stop using LONG and LONG RAW I
dropped every example that used them.

But there is a significant difference with the ISO syntax and here is
why.

1. 99% of all code in Oracle anyone sees will be ISO compliant and the
Oracle professional must understand it and be able to maintain it.

2. In the Oracle community those that code with ANSI are generally
viewed as newbies who have recently come over from some other
product. Use ANSI in an interview and likely you won't get the job
if the other person that applied is your technical equal but uses
the syntax that looks more "normal" to the interview team.

And while I expect you won't like #2, your liking it is not relevant to
the fact that I have seen this played out in multiple interviews.

There are things the Oracle supported ANSI syntax will do, such as full
outer joins that are far more complex to do with ISO. And there are
things the ANSI syntax allows that are just plain moronic ... such as
natural joins. I encourage all of my students to learn all of it and
then use the appropriate tool for the environment in which they are
working.

> Interesting to note that Oracle bothered. Apparantly they saw a need for
> compliance for core function...
> http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B14117_01/server.101/b10759/queries006.htm

They seem to always embrace that which is common. But also to extend
where they see a 'need' (you may read that as 'market opportunity').
The critical factor is that I can accomplish the goal in the manner that
is most pleasing to me as a developer. The amount of ANSI code I have
seen in Oracle applications is a very small percentage: Not more than a
few percent. That may change over decades but it isn't changing any time
soon.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)

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