Blog, blog and blog!!!

I started this blog with a lot of passion. I was a student at that time and mindset was completely different than I have today. In course of three years I realized that even passion has its own limits and corporate world is much different than what we expect. Here is a bit techy example to explain my journey. :) I learned and believed that Oracle RDBMS is an almost perfect software that is ever written. Even the masterpieces like Linux Kernel suffer from dead locks but Oracle RDBMS does not. To this point I still believe in this theory but what I learned after when I came in real world business was even more surprising. Oracle may be the perfect software but that does not mean it won't have any problems. After all there are situations in real world where Oracle RDBMS is dependent on Softwares like Windows operating system.

When I started blogging my world was hardly anything more than Oracle and Blogger. So the hurdles were minimum. As time went along and money became a more prominent factor in dictating the road that I need to follow, things changed. When I learned the hard truth that the Golden era of web when every blog and website can make money was over; this passion of mine suffered more because I required to look after other things more than blogging because from there my livelihood was coming.

Although I never quite blogging permanently but the thing that suffered the most was this blog of my own where I started all. My blogging range expanded from Oracle to include Cricket, general tech, Smart Phones, tablets, Social Media and of course I also blogged a lot about my new found love i.e. iPhone; but that was on some of my close friend's websites. 

This is my third coming back to myself and I hope that I can keep up with it. But the plan is more realistic this time and the goal is simple for now i.e. blog two to three times per week and mostly on Weekends. 

Starting With PL/SQL

The more I hesitate about a thing the more it proves to be useful for me. This is the philosophy that I have developed about myself over the years. Although in professional life you should not hesitate in doing something and I try my best to follow this approach. But there is a thing about how you conceive a thing. From the start I always hesitated to work with Oracle. But when I did it, then it was more then just a work. It was an experience of lifetime. Going through Oracle I always found it difficult to conceive PL/SQL. I must say that I under estimated it until and unless I started some real series application development. Well I must point out here that I am not good in development. I am just starting with it. I always did DBA tasks more then development tasks and feel more confident in doing them. But I have started thinking about it seriously.

One of the reasons is PL/SQL. I started liking PL/SQL when I heard and read about its features in different articles and blogs. The other motivation was that Oracle continues to empower it as a full fledge programming language rather then just an extension to SQL. Now one may wonder that what is the origin of PL/SQL and why the word SQL is included in naming it. While I will talk about the history of PL/SQL in a separate post, here is why this language was introduced at all.

Oracle is an object relational database management system, the first ever RDBMS in history. Like any other RDBMS the primary interface to the Oracle database is through SQL. And believe me you can retrieve almost all kind of data stored in a database through SQL. But despite all the enhancements of Oracle in ANSI SQL, the fact remains is that SQL is still a data retrieval mechanism rather then a programming language. It still lacks the features of a programming language like looping through records processing one at a time, encrypting data for security, storing code on server rather then on client side and unable to handle arrays, collections and other similar data types. So this was the primary motive behind PL/SQL. To enable the developer to use programming language features with tight integration of database. And believe me; I am saying it after thinking for a moment that PL/SQL has become a very powerful programming language for applications that use Oracle as back end database.