My PL/SQL Coding Standards

As I mentioned recently a long-running trolling thread in the OTN forum has recently taken a new twist, by reviving the PL/SQL Coding Standards meme. Alas I was wrong in my prediction that the OTN moderators would soon kill the thread. Not only is it still going but the evil genius behind it is still going, and regularly changing their handle. Currently it is my turn to be impersonated.

In order to justify my assertion in that thread I have decided to publish my damn fine standards. So here they are.

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APC's Damn Fine PL/SQL Coding Standards

1. Your code must implement the requirements correctly and completely.
   
2. Your code must have a suite of unit and integration tests (preferably automated) to prove it implements the requirements correctly and completely.
   
3. Your code must implement the requirements as efficiently and peformantly as possible.
   

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Is that it?

These standards have much to recommend them. They are easy to read. They won't need revision whenever there's a new version of PL/SQL. And they focus on what is really important in code: correct functionality. Of course things such as layout and naming of variables are important, I'm not saying they're not. But a PL/SQL procedure can be neatly laid out, rigourously capitalised and thoroughly commented and yet be full of bugs. In my experience, most coding standards tend to document in tedious detail the things which are easy to standardise - use of upper and lower case, line indentation, etc - rather than the things which actually matter.

Also the strictures of codings standards are rarely revised. I still get handed coding standards which say things like "Always use explicit cursors". So either these standards were written ten years ago or the author has not coded any PL/SQL in the last ten years or the author should be shot. Whichever it is, if the standards document contains such canards, why should anybody pay it the slightest attention?

I intend to expand upon some of these points in future posts. If you want a more regular set of PL/SQL Coding Standards then you should check out the redoubtable William Robertson's site. Alternatively, invest in a copy of Oracle PL/SQL Best Practices by Steven Feuerstein (Whom God Preserve). I don't agree with everything that Steven writes but I firmly believe that if every PL/SQL coder in the world followed these guidelines the overall quality of the global PL/SQL codebase would increase by several orders of magnitude.

Update

The troll has now reverted to an anonymous userNNNNNN handle and restored the original text. Obviously even they have got tired of the joke. Or been stricken by conscience.