Oracle & perl

Continuing to work with SqlPlus and Oracle 10g. Today I resolved two issues I had with an sql query.

With the first problem, I was passing two parameters into the .sql file and when the sql was executed in the file, along with the selected information, it would output 'old ... my sql here with the params not replaced' and then 'new... my sql here with the params replaced'. Thanks for that, but I know which params I'm replace, I don't need more notification of it. It turns out getting rid of this notification is fairly easy. At the top of the script, just put 'set verify off' and no more 'old...new' junk.

In the second problem (same script) I was doing some division and there were instances where my divisor could be (and was) 0. Sql doesn't like to divide by 0 at all (like pretty much every other language I've worked with). There is a neat little fix to get around this as well. My divisor looked like 'select count(a.blah) from ....' and if you add 'select decode(count(a.blah),0,1,count(a.blah)) from ...' it will substitute a 1 if the selected count is a 0. It worked super.

Messing around with Perl some more, I discovered some good functions. @myArray = split(/~/,$var); will take make an array of strings, seperating them by every '~' found in the string. Working with arrays, push(@myArray, someValue) pushes a new value onto 'myArray'. Pretty basic stuff, I know. I like to celebrate small victories (and remember them for next time).

Can you believe it, I hit a dog riding my bike on the way home from work today. A big doberman. He ran right infront of me. I slammed on my brakes and my rear end came up. I didn't hit him hard - but enough to put my handle bars out of alignment with my front tire a bit. I fixed that at the first red light I stopped at. I also just about hit a snake warming himself on the pavement.