Oracle PLSQL Procedures And Cursors, SQLDeveloper edition

I have a number of PL/SQL procedures that return cursors as out parameters, these are difficult to test outside of PL/SQL Developer and its wonderful Test window.  I’ve found a series of commands that can be run as commands in SQLDeveloper (and I hope Sql*plus) to allow cursor parameters to be manipulated.

variable v_your_cursor refcursor;
begin
your_function(p_your_cursor => :v_your_cursor);
end;
/
print :v_your_cursor;

You can add other parameters too. For example a varchar is
variable v_your_character varchar2(255);
execute :v_your_character := 'initial-value';

Comments adjustment?

((Crossposted to my personal Journal))

I was reading through Roger Johansson‘s latest journal post on Comments. It got me thinking back to the comments post written by an artist whose blog I read. It was along the lines of AOL-isms, hearing “You’re Great” is good, hearing Why is better and hearing “How You Can Improve” is gold. For given values naturally.

In Roger’s article he mentions that once a comment gets on Digg, civility goes out of the window. Made me think about AOL’s “Me Too” and Digg’s site addition/ ranking system.

Perhaps alongside Comments there should be a Kudos/Dekudos option? So that instead of a bunch of “Me Too”s and “You Suck”s taking up comments space, there could be a # of Kudos and a # of Dekudos attached to the post, and you can click them to see who Kudoed or Dekudoed? That way people can “Me Too” without feeling stupid, adding their voice of support/ derision to the whole thing, but without having to struggle with English to get their idea ahead. I know that a lot of the time I’ve wanted to comment, but after reading all the other comments I haven’t had anything fresh to over rather than wanting to add my voice to the approving masses.

Thoughts?

Working Program Driven Enclosures in Podcast Feeds that iTunes will Read.

Problem

iTunes’ podcasting application refuses enclosures that do not end in an extension that it can recognise as an understandable file format. Example:

• http://myhost/site/myfile.mp3 GOOD
• http://myhost/site/myfile.php?file=141 BAD

So if you’re serving files from a database via an application, you’re out of luck no matter what headers you send.

Solution

Add a filename and additional question mark to the end of the URI:

• http://myhost/site/myfile.php?file=141&filename.mp3?

(This is made easier if your php file has the filename.mp3 as it’s get parameter, as you just tack a ? on the end)