Oracle: PLSQL News You Can Use
by Steven Feuerstein

Steven offers a couple of quick tips to help improve the robustness of your programs as well as your ability to diagnose problems (and find solutions to them) more quickly. [Read Full Article]

DB2: An Overview of Mainframe Specialty Processors
by Craig S. Mullins

Anyone who uses an IBM z Series mainframe has probably heard about zIIPs and zAAPs and other specialty processors. But maybe you haven't yet done any real investigation into what they are, what they do, and why they exist. So, with that in mind, let's take a brief journey into the world of specialty processors! [Read Full Article]

Software Development Tips & Techniques: Resolving "Subtle" Program Bugs
by Tom Mochal

In many cases, when you encounter a bug, you can look at the general characteristics and the error message generated to make a quick determination of the cause. In other cases, there might be nothing obvious that would show the point of failure. These are called "subtle" bugs. They are not obvious to find, and they are generally caused by a combination of events that masks the original root cause. They can take a long time to resolve. [Read Full Article]

True or false: you can execute as many DML statements as you want within a single FORALL statement.

Please send your responses along with your name, city and country to Puzzler@toadworld.com by October 18, 2009. We will randomly select four winners who submit the correct answer, and each winner will receive a Toad World t-shirt!

September's Puzzler Answer: [Review September's Puzzler]

The correct answer to this month's puzzler is 'C'.

You cannot use DBMS_SQL, but you can write code like this:

BEGIN
   FORALL indx IN names_in.FIRST .. names_in.LAST
      EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 
      'INSERT INTO ' || l_table
         || ' VALUES (' || l_values(indx) 
         || ')';
END;

A is false: You can execute all three kinds of DML statements within an EXECUTE IMMEDIATE statement, as shown below:

BEGIN
   FORALL indx IN names_in.FIRST .. names_in.LAST
      EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 
      'INSERT INTO ' || l_table
         || ' VALUES (' || l_values(indx) 
         || ')';
END;

B is false: You can execute all three kinds of DML statements within an EXECUTE IMMEDIATE statement, as shown below:

BEGIN
   FORALL indx IN names_in.FIRST .. names_in.LAST
      EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 
      'INSERT INTO ' || l_table
         || ' VALUES (' || l_values(indx) 
         || ')';
END;

D is false: You can execute dynamic DML inside FORALL, but only with native dynamic SQL (EXECUTE IMMEDIATE). You cannot use DBMS_SQL, but instead must write code like this:

BEGIN
   FORALL indx IN names_in.FIRST .. names_in.LAST
      EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 
      'INSERT INTO ' || l_table
         || ' VALUES (' || l_values(indx) 
         || ')';
END;

Winners of September's Puzzler:

• Bora Uzum from Turkey
• Devang Bhatt from USA
• Jesús Martin from Spain
• Stefania Magnolo from Italy

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