Philipp Salvisberg’s Blog

Database-centric development

2020-11-12

Formatter Callback Functions

Introduction In this blog post, I explained how the formatter in SQL Developer works and outlined how you can change the formatter result using Arbori and JavaScript. In this post, I explain what exactly the provided formatter callback functions do. For that, I use simple examples. I produced all results with a […]
2020-11-01

Patching SQL Developer 20.2 with SQLcl’s Formatter

Introduction SQLcl 20.3.0 was released on October 29, 2020. It’s the first time I remember that we have a SQLcl version without the corresponding SQL Developer version. This is a pity because this SQLcl version also contains formatter fixes. And formatting code is something I do more often in the full-blown IDE […]
2020-10-10

Navigation in Large PL/SQL Code

Are you editing large PL/SQL code in SQL Developer? Have you noticed that sometimes you cannot navigate to a declaration anymore? No Ctrl-Click under Windows. No Command-Click under macOS. In this blog post, I explain the reason and how to fix that in SQL Developer 20.2. What Is Large? Usually, we define […]
2020-09-28

Disable Formatter for Code Sections in SQL Developer

In this blog post, I show how you can disable the formatter for some parts of your code. IntelliJ IDEA and the Eclipse IDE use tags in comments to identify sections of code that must not be formatted. By default, these tags are `@formatter:off` and `@formatter:on`. Example When I format this code […]
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 […]
2020-08-28

Formatting SQL Code Blocks in Markdown Files

Introduction Everything Changes. Our Trivadis SQL & PL/SQL Coding Guidelines are no exceptions. We plan to change rule #1 of our coding styles. From “Keywords are written uppercase, names are written in lowercase.”  to “Keywords and names are written in lowercase.“. We have 103 Markdown files and most of them contain several […]
2020-08-14

Always Free Autonomous JSON Database?

Introduction Oracle just released the Autonomous JSON Database (AJD). This is a special version of the Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP) database focussing on managing JSON documents via Simple Oracle Document Access (SODA) and SQL. Beda Hammerschmidt shows in this blog post how you can use SQL Developer Web to execute SODA and […]
2020-08-09

Formatting SQL Scripts in a Directory Tree with SQLcl

Introduction Oracle’s SQL Developer can format code in any worksheet and PL/SQL editor. The formatter is highly configurable and the default formatting results are becoming better with every version. Oracle’s SQLcl is a command-line tool. It’s a stripped-down version of SQL Developer and is known as a user-friendly alternative for SQL*Plus. But […]
2020-06-21

Names Matter

This is one of my favourite quotes: There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.— Phil Karlton IT is my daily life. And this quote is so true. Lately, I’ve been thinking much more than usual about naming, and that names really matter. This led to […]
2020-06-07

utPLSQL for SQL Developer 1.2 – What’s New?

Today I released an update of the utPLSQL extension for SQL Developer. In this blog post, I explain the changes in the latest version 1.2. These are the new features: Download the latest version from GitHub. Debug Test Now you can run one or more utPLSQL tests with the PL/SQL Debugger. To […]