Yesterday evening we had the annual “We went to OOW and this is what’s new in the world we call Oracle” at AMIS.
Starting around 5pm and ending around 10pm a lot of information was presented by several AMIS colleagues.
My contribution to the evening was (amongst others) a little bit of new features in SQL and PL/SQL, only a little bit as there is too much to cover in just 20 minutes.
It’s the little things that make me happy. What is the little thing that I like?
When you define a table you can assign a default value to a column (here it comes) based on a sequence.
Take a look at the following (taken from the presentation Tom Kyte did during OOW):
First a sequence is created, with the resounding name S. Next the table (named T) is created where the column X has a default based on the NEXTVAL of the sequence S.
Just to repeat the line of interest:
x int default s.nextval primary key
How cool is that?
No longer will you need to create a trigger to fill the column with the nextvalue from a sequence, you just declare it this way and you’re done.
Maybe it’s just syntactic sugar, I don’t know (yet) and frankly I don’t care. I like the fact that this feature makes it more declarative to populate the primary key (or any other column of course).
I’m happy.
