Philipp Salvisberg’s Blog

Database-centric development

2018-05-06

Why and How Using the accessible_by_clause

The accessible_by_clause was introduced in Oracle Database 12 Release 1 and extended in Release 2. If you don‘t know this feature, I suggest having a look at the documentation or reading Steven Feuerstein’s blog post. In this blog post, I talk about how to use this feature properly. Consider you have a […]
2018-04-30

Accessible PL/SQL Programs in Oracle Database 18c

I’ve recently installed plscope-utils in an Oracle Database 18c instance. A package body using the SYS.UTL_XML.ParseQuery function failed to compile. The error message was: PLS-00306: wrong number or types of arguments in call to ‘PARSEQUERY’. Fixing that was easy. I just had to pass the new mandatory currUid parameter. But then I’ve got the […]
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. […]
2017-03-17

plscope-utils – Utilities for PL/Scope

PL/Scope was introduced with Oracle Database version 11.1 and covered PL/SQL only. SQL statements such as SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and MERGE were simply ignored. Analysing PL/SQL source code without covering SQL does not provide a lot of value. Hence, PL/Scope was neglected by the Oracle community. But this seems to change with […]