Nibbling at SQL
Hearing both of these guys (Paul Nielsen and Louis Davidson) together was awesome (another DevLink Nashville plug). They share common views, but also differ on a few things which was really nice to hear. Even the experts have their own ideas which leaves room for us common folk. No absolutes, lots of grey or gray depending on which side of the pond you find yourself (someone's commentary here). A few items that I knew were bad are cursors among others. I liked the bantering of normalization pros/cons...
I am really, really new to PL/SQL having spent time on DB2/400 and MSSQL most of my career. I needed to manipulate time in Oracle and tried to apply existing knowledge with mixed results. Craziness like having to select from table 'dual' instead of nixing the 'from' keyword like in T-SQL. Weird. This site has helped a lot due its simple examples to help build my confidence. So anyway on to the title of the post... (sorry for the alignment of the code, first time pasting from Toad) I am really curious...