Ed The Dev .com

This article by Michael G Schwern is exceptional. Perl testing is one area where you do not want to just jump in and see what works. The whole point of testing is to make sure you’re doing things right. So read the article – get the best start you can.

Nearly every database record insert should automatically populate two required fields: ID and ADDED_DATE. Every table should have these fields, and it would be nice if the database automatically filled them in for you each time you add a record.

This script creates a trigger that populates those two fields for you each time you insert a new ‘RECORD’.

CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER "DatabaseName"."RECORD_ADDED" 
before insert on "RECORD_TABLE"

for each row begin

if inserting then

select CURRENT_DATE into :NEW."ADDED_DATE" from dual;
if :NEW."RECORD_ID" is null then

select RecordIdSeq.nextval into :NEW."RECORD_ID" from dual;
end if;

end if; 
end;


/
ALTER TRIGGER "DatabaseName"."RECORD_ADDED" ENABLE;

And this script creates the Sequence required for the trigger above to work.

CREATE SEQUENCE  "DatabaseName"."RecordIdSeq"  MINVALUE 1 MAXVALUE
 999999999999999999999999999 INCREMENT BY 1 START WITH 41 
CACHE 20 NOORDER  NOCYCLE ;

If you use this code, be sure to modify the DatabaseName to match yours and replace RECORD with a sensible table name.

I just got my new external hard drive case.

As you can see from the picture above, it’s very nice looking.

Stay tuned. I will update this article with code, tools and instructions for my complete backup solution – as soon as it is finished.