The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Sgt. Zim · 2006-05-22 Reply Admin

Someone:
Someone Else:
INSURE is to buy insurance for.
ENSURE is to make sure of.

Humor WTF: it was a pun. This was at an insurance company (not an ensurance company)

Not only that ...

<pedant>

Although it's not common, and it's not taught this way any longer (the dogma of "there's no way to ensure breasts like Dolly Parton's" was pounded into me in high school, even though it was wrong...), Merriam-Webster lists "ensure" and "insure" as synonyms.

</pedant>

I'd suggest renting a clue and a dictionary.

Bus Raker · 2006-05-22 Reply Admin

baldvin:
> This is why I counsel my devs not to put their name in the comments...

This was also my first thought. I googled for him a little bit, and this address came up: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=20677597

Now a real WTF: you can't see on that page if that guy is a programmer or not (so you cannot be sure if it is him or not), but in the "Who I'd like to meet" section there is M. Bolton, the same name as in the second comment!!

Didn't you notice all of the references to the movie Office Space? Please tell me you've seen the movie (if not you can complete the sentence 'the real WTF is')

Coughptcha · 2006-05-22 Reply Admin

How many years went by between the insertion of the div0 and the uncovering of the same? WTF?

merreborn · 2006-05-22 Reply Admin

lucky luke:
frosty:
CodeWhisperer:
This is why I counsel my devs not to put their name in the comments...

You do? I'd encourage them to so that I'd know who needs to be shown the light (i.e. given guidance, not the light outside the building).

You do? I just use something like CVS and be able to see exactly what everyone did and not rely on a comment to decide who to blame ;)

It's awfully nice when your developers actually include a comment in their CVS commits. It's always a bitch when you know an error was introduced in the last month, in file X, but file X has been committed 12 times without a single commit comment in the last month. Totally makes the 'cvs log' command useless.

2006-05-22 Reply Admin

Bus Raker:
baldvin:
> This is why I counsel my devs not to put their name in the comments...

This was also my first thought. I googled for him a little bit, and this address came up: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=20677597

Now a real WTF: you can't see on that page if that guy is a programmer or not (so you cannot be sure if it is him or not), but in the "Who I'd like to meet" section there is M. Bolton, the same name as in the second comment!!

Didn't you notice all of the references to the movie Office Space? Please tell me you've seen the movie (if not you can complete the sentence 'the real WTF is')

I hadn't even heard of the film until this comment, let alone watched it (I obviously don't get out enough!)
In case anyone else out there is in the same situation as me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Space

2006-05-22 Reply Admin

If you look at Michael Bolton's myspace account, you'll see that his username is notalentassclown00. I think that explains everything.

http://www.myspace.com/notalentassclown00

2006-05-22 Reply Admin

marvin_rabbit:
Transcript of conversion from June 8, 2003. In attendance are PHB and M. Bolton.

PHB: The users say they keep getting "Overflow Errors". Can you fix that?

M. Bolton: ...

And I can almost envision M. Bolton rubbing his hands together with eager, conniving glee.

This kind of childishly literal means of evasion of actual design seems to be a strategy commonly favored by neurotic, neophobic "Look, at least it works" types. In an environment lacking peer reviews, it's almost impossible to stop such behavior. And the other developers pay the price.

GalacticCowboy · 2006-05-22 Reply Admin

Sean:
This brings me to something I always wonder about. What goes through the developer's mind when he or she comes up with this kind of idea? I can't decide between "This will really wow 'em," or "You know, this is so crazy it just might work!"

"I'd have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you darn kids."

2006-05-22 Reply Admin

merreborn:

It's awfully nice when your developers actually include a comment in their CVS commits. It's always a bitch when you know an error was introduced in the last month, in file X, but file X has been committed 12 times without a single commit comment in the last month. Totally makes the 'cvs log' command useless.

Two things fix that problem:

1. CVS trigger to require a commit comment. This works really well unless your developers just begin using bogus comments (i.e., "laskjdfal"), in which case you can explain to them why they should not do that and then ask them to find employment elsewhere.

2. CodeHistorian to find the bug. It's a neat little utility that helps you do find the source of the problem. (http://www.codehistorian.com/codehistorian-overview.php).

2006-05-22 Reply Admin

xrT:

i guess they're thinking that one day datatypes will increase in size and the forced overflow error would not error out anymore...thus using the division by zero error..

Yet they're not thinking far enough ahead.

Some day, my friends, humanity will learn how to divide by zero.

And then where will they be?

TomCo · 2006-05-22 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
marvin_rabbit:
Transcript of conversion from June 8, 2003. In attendance are PHB and M. Bolton.

PHB: The users say they keep getting "Overflow Errors". Can you fix that?

M. Bolton: ...

And I can almost envision M. Bolton rubbing his hands together with eager, conniving glee.

This kind of childishly literal means of evasion of actual design seems to be a strategy commonly favored by neurotic, neophobic "Look, at least it works" types. In an environment lacking peer reviews, it's almost impossible to stop such behavior. And the other developers pay the price.

Bob Slydell: So we just went ahead and fixed the glitch.

Bill Lumbergh: Great.

Dom Portwood: So um, Milton has been let go?

Bob Slydell: Well just a second there, professor. We uh, we fixed the *glitch*. So he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it will just work itself out naturally.

Bob Porter: We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem solved from your end.

http://www.angelfire.com/oh/quotations/movies/o/officespace.html

Alexis de Torquemada · 2006-05-22 Reply Admin

Anonymous:

Yet they're not thinking far enough ahead.

Some day, my friends, humanity will learn how to divide by zero.

And then where will they be?

I'm not sure whether this advance would be much appreciated. As a German soccer coach once said: "I could walk on water and people would complain that I can't even swim."

2006-05-22 Reply Admin

marvin_rabbit:

v_divzero := v_divzero / 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000001;

Shouldn't that produce a "Division by Very Null" error instead...?

Anonymous:

The real WTF is:

Seven deadly sins
Seven ways to win
Seven holy paths to hell
And your trip begins

Seven downward slopes
Seven bloodied hopes
Seven are your burning fires,
Seven your desires...

Thank you, Bruce Dickinson...

masklinn · 2006-05-22 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
That's why I love that the Toroise SVN plug in names the compare with earlier version function "Blame"

Blame is actually the standard SVN command and you can also use it under the aliases "praise", "annotate" and "ann" (try it out in command line, all 4 display the help file for svn blame)

2006-05-22 Reply Admin

1. CVS trigger to require a commit comment. This works really well unless your developers just begin using bogus comments (i.e., "laskjdfal"), in which case you can explain to them why they should not do that and then ask them to find employment elsewhere.

works for me. You can also back out commits with fake comments, or else require that they be fixed before they get commit privs back.

RyuO · 2006-05-22 Reply Admin

Needless to say, Initech's expertise is not in Oracle, so I tried to anticipate where they were going with the code. For clarity, I left out some production-class stuff like PL/SQL exception handlers, which is what they should have been looking at for the original code:

CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE credt_union_exceptions IS
 c_money_overflow_limit CONSTANT PLS_INTEGER := 3;
 c_overflow CONSTANT PLS_INTEGER := -22053;
 c_zero_divide CONSTANT PLS_INTEGER := -1476;
 x_overflow EXCEPTION;
 PRAGMA EXCEPTION_INIT(x_overflow,-22053);
 PROCEDURE handle(
 p_value IN OUT NUMBER,
 p_sql_code IN NUMBER,
 p_sql_errm IN VARCHAR2);
END credt_union_exceptions;
/
SHO ERR PACKAGE credt_union_exceptions

CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE BODY credt_union_exceptions IS
 --==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==
 -- Parameters: NONE ==
 -- Purpose: FORCE END OF STORED PROCEDURE ==
 -- Interval: Called From Other Programs. ==
 -- Tables: NONE ==
 -- Sub Programs: NONE ==
 -- Author: S. Nagheenanajar ==
 -- Create Date: 2002-10-08 ==
 -- Revisions: ==
 -- Author Date Description ==
 -- ------------------------- ---------- ------------------------------------------------- ==
 -- M. Bolton 2003-06-09 Changed to DIV0 error instead of overflow error ==
 -- P. Gibbons 2006-05-22 Subsumed into general exception handler ==
 --==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==
 FUNCTION overflow (p_value IN OUT NUMBER) RETURN NUMBER IS
 v_new_value NUMBER := TRUNC(p_value,c_money_overflow_limit);
 v_overflow NUMBER := p_value-v_new_value;
 BEGIN
 -- really underrated movie, actually
 UPDATE cu_balances SET
 balance = balance + v_overflow
 WHERE account_id = 99238468;
 COMMIT;
 RETURN v_new_value;
 END overflow;

 PROCEDURE handle(
 p_value IN OUT NUMBER,
 p_sql_code IN NUMBER,
 p_sql_errm IN VARCHAR2) IS
 BEGIN
 CASE p_sql_code
 WHEN c_overflow THEN
 p_value := overflow(p_value);
 WHEN c_zero_divide THEN
 p_value := 0;
 ELSE RAISE_APPLICATION_ERROR(-20000,p_sql_errm);
 END CASE;
 END handle;
END credt_union_exceptions;
/
SHO ERR PACKAGE BODY credt_union_exceptions

2006-05-22 Reply Admin

And I thought the real WTF was that SQL Server doesn't allow the use of RaIsError (The Sun God boo boo. Thanks, Bill, for saving me a vowel!) in user defined functions. Divide by zero begins to look pretty useful.

rob_squared · 2006-05-22 Reply Admin

Sean:
This brings me to something I always wonder about. What goes through the developer's mind when he or she comes up with this kind of idea? I can't decide between "This will really wow 'em," or "You know, this is so crazy it just might work!"

More along the lines of, "It's almost time for me to leave, I'll fix this tomorrow."

Then they get drunk and promptly forget the whole thing.

2006-05-22 Reply Admin

I havn't tested this but is there any reason why

throw: Error;

wouldn't have the desired effect?

I that in the entire vm.js file there is no try catch exception handing so

there is certanly no danger of the this getting caught inapropriatly.

2006-05-22 Reply Admin

Anonymous:

What makes this so bad is that I do something quite similar in my compiler. I couldn't find a way to make Javascript just abort so I had to force an error.

Spend hours reading and googling.

(Yea, yea, I know, I could have set a global status flag and then tracked it back and after every function call did a 'if (errorLevel == fatal) return;' but that seemed even worse to me.)

http://motevm.sourceforge.net/

http://motevm.sourceforge.net/motevm/vm.js (killJS at the bottom)

(Sorry for the lack of documentation, its not been 'released to the wild' yet. Got too busy at work to finish things so its on hold till the end of the season, but if you are curious you can reach me at:
r3jjs AT yahoo DOT com)

My Last post was in response to the above

throw: Error;

is I believe the correct way to implement killJS.

WeatherGod · 2006-05-22 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
INSURE is to buy insurance for.

ENSURE is to make sure of.

Thank you, I have gotten sick of explaining that to people. I see this mistake everywhere, even in newspaper articles.

WeatherGod · 2006-05-22 Reply Admin

Sgt. Zim:
Someone:
Someone Else:
INSURE is to buy insurance for.
ENSURE is to make sure of.

Humor WTF: it was a pun. This was at an insurance company (not an ensurance company)

Not only that ...

<pedant>

Although it's not common, and it's not taught this way any longer (the dogma of "there's no way to ensure breasts like Dolly Parton's" was pounded into me in high school, even though it was wrong...), Merriam-Webster lists "ensure" and "insure" as synonyms.

</pedant>

I'd suggest renting a clue and a dictionary.

Ok, I stand partly corrected. My English teachers never allowed us to use them as synonyms. Probably because of the entry for "ensure" states that there is a difference in some context between the two words, so by using the correct word, you will insure against any confusion about what was intended.

Gene Wirchenko · 2006-05-22 Reply Admin

WeatherGod:
Ok, I stand partly corrected. My English teachers never allowed us to use them as synonyms. Probably because of the entry for "ensure" states that there is a difference in some context between the two words, so by using the correct word, you will insure against any confusion about what was intended.

My understanding is that the conflation of "insure" and "ensure" into "insure" is a U.S. dialectal difference. As a Canadian, I ensure that I use "ensure" for to make certain of.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

2006-05-22 Reply Admin

You mean:
throw myBackOut();

2006-05-22 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
At a job I had back in the mid-80s, the same code supported several Unix flavours and VMS. In order to produce a stack trace on error in VMS, they called the one and only Fortran subroutine in the system to do a divide by zero, since that would force a stack trace. I had already gotten rid of all the other Fortran remnants on the system, so I attacked the big orange wall and found the documentation on how to produce a stack trace in C with a VMS system call. I took great pride in removing the last trace of Fortran from that system.

Ahh, I remember all those orange VMS manuals all too well. Thanks for the memories, dude!

2006-05-22 Reply Admin

lucky luke:
frosty:
CodeWhisperer:

This is why I counsel my devs not to put their name in the comments...

-cw

You do? I'd encourage them to so that I'd know who needs to be shown the light (i.e. given guidance, not the light outside the building).

You do? I just use something like CVS and be able to see exactly what everyone did and not rely on a comment to decide who to blame ;)

Comments are better because the person who writes the code isn't necessarily the person who checks it in. If you're trying to get your codebase stable, say for a beta release, you would not want to be checking in new features. That means that people writing new features may have to wait a while (perhaps months) to get new features checked in. I've had code that I've written checked in 5-6 months after I no longer worked there.

Coughptcha · 2006-05-22 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
Comments are better because the person who writes the code isn't necessarily the person who checks it in. If you're trying to get your codebase stable, say for a beta release, you would not want to be checking in new features. That means that people writing new features may have to wait a while (perhaps months) to get new features checked in. I've had code that I've written checked in 5-6 months after I no longer worked there.

I've heard of lousy SCM, but that certainly ranks up there.

I've seen teams branch off a "release" stream and keep the main branch as a development branch (which is incorrect, but workable). Better to branch off a new development stream for the next release, in order to submit code which isn't intended for the current release. There's no excuse for having either the current or the next release become unstable because some code hasn't been checked in for many months after it's been changed.

Digitalbath · 2006-05-22 Reply Admin

GalacticCowboy:

Sean:
This brings me to something I always wonder about. What goes through the developer's mind when he or she comes up with this kind of idea? I can't decide between "This will really wow 'em," or "You know, this is so crazy it just might work!"

"I'd have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you darn kids."

Rut row.

2006-05-23 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
My Last post was in response to the above

throw: Error;

is I believe the correct way to implement killJS.

A dozen thank you!s.

impslayer · 2006-05-23 Reply Admin

Bus Raker:

baldvin:
> This is why I counsel my devs not to put their name in the comments...

This was also my first thought. I googled for him a little bit, and this address came up: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=20677597

Now a real WTF: you can't see on that page if that guy is a programmer or not (so you cannot be sure if it is him or not), but in the "Who I'd like to meet" section there is M. Bolton, the same name as in the second comment!!

Didn't you notice all of the references to the movie Office Space? Please tell me you've seen the movie (if not you can complete the sentence 'the real WTF is')

The rea... Hell, you know what I mean... Anyway, it's that I don't even know if Office Space ever came to Sweden... It must've, but I can't remember it, even though at that point in time I didn't even have any kids to disctract me from living :)

Swedes, did you watch Office Space in Sweden? Was it as good as it seems?

2006-05-23 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
The real WTF is:

Seven deadly sins
Seven ways to win
Seven holy paths to hell
And your trip begins

Seven downward slopes
Seven bloodied hopes
Seven are your burning fires,
Seven your desires...

Of course. If he'd been a Pratchett fan it would have been 8, a Douglas Adams fan 42,
but with 7 he's gotta be an Iron Maiden or Orson Scott Card guy.

2006-05-23 Reply Admin

Not the yanks this time, but eh - good try lads!

I WORKED AT THE COMPANY WITH THIS GUY!

He used to listen to Michael Bolton so loudly on his iPOD that you could hear it 3 desks away.

Bolton's not that bad on the 4th listen.

2006-05-23 Reply Admin

CodeWhisperer:
That's what source control management systems are for. Keeps track of who made what changes and even gives them a space to explain why they changed what they did. That way the company has the info, but anyone who stumbles on the code doesn't.

No one brought this up yet? How, exactly, do you get a COMMIT LOG from a set of STORED PROCEDURES? Unless you have a diabolical DBA who runs every update through source control before uploading it, how do you get people to not abuse it? Or has cvs/svn been extended inside databases while I wasn't looking? (I know a couple have proprietary code control.)

One of these days I'll figure my password out again.

2006-05-23 Reply Admin

I think you are looking for "SET XACT_ABORT" ;)

weaponious · 2006-05-23 Reply Admin

That wall's not 4 ft high!

2006-05-23 Reply Admin

No no, it is Charles Dikkens, the famous dutch author.

ammoQ · 2006-05-23 Reply Admin

foxyshadis:

No one brought this up yet? How, exactly, do you get a COMMIT LOG from a set of STORED PROCEDURES? Unless you have a diabolical DBA who runs every update through source control before uploading it, how do you get people to not abuse it? Or has cvs/svn been extended inside databases while I wasn't looking? (I know a couple have proprietary code control.)

I think it could somehow be done with Oracle's system triggers but the best and easiest way is to prevent programmers from creating/replacing stored procedures directly in the (staging / productive) database; instead of that, scripts to create/replace stored procedure are checked out from the CVS and run in a "build" process.

For my personal needs, I have configured SlickEdit (my favourite PL/SQL editor) to load the previous version of a stored procedure from the database and append it to a save file before actually compiling the stored procedures. (Yes, that means 10 versions of the procedure if I need 10 attempts to fix all syntax errors, but who cares, disk space is cheap)
This way, even if one of my undisciplined coworkers makes changes directly in the database, his version is saved so I can compare/merge it if the collission is detected. By far not perfect, but a life-saver anyway.

2006-05-23 Reply Admin

This is the type of comment that is typically made by egocentric types who haven't yet discovered that customer satisfaction ought to be a higher priority interest than programmer satisfaction. And that "other developers paying the price" (of designs that are anywhere in the range of absolutely terrible to slightly imperfect) is a lesser evil than "customers paying the price" (of developers getting stuck in endless debates over how to organise "proper" error handling).

2006-05-23 Reply Admin

Where is my quoted text ????

Grrrrrrrrrrr.

AntiDragon · 2006-05-23 Reply Admin

I think a little sick just came up in my mouth...

(Seriously - this is bad enough to make me post....Oh dear, oh dear...)

ammoQ · 2006-05-23 Reply Admin

Erwin:
This is the type of comment that is typically made by egocentric types who haven't yet discovered that customer satisfaction ought to be a higher priority interest than programmer satisfaction. And that "other developers paying the price" (of designs that are anywhere in the range of absolutely terrible to slightly imperfect) is a lesser evil than "customers paying the price" (of developers getting stuck in endless debates over how to organise "proper" error handling).

In the long term, what is bad for the other developers will most likely be bad for the customer, too. Systems live longer than expected, changes are more frequent than expected. Unmaintainable code makes changes more expensive and by far more likely to have undesired side effects (aka bugs).

2006-05-23 Reply Admin

CodeWhisperer:
frosty:
CodeWhisperer:

This is why I counsel my devs not to put their name in the comments...

-cw

You do? I'd encourage them to so that I'd know who needs to be shown the light (i.e. given guidance, not the light outside the building).

That's what source control management systems are for. Keeps track of who made what changes and even gives them a space to explain why they changed what they did. That way the company has the info, but anyone who stumbles on the code doesn't.

Two reasons: 1) after a few years you end up with multi-page change logs at the start of every source file (common); 2) by identifying yourself you're actually opening yourself to legal repercussions if your WTF ever kills someone or loses them millions of dollars (much less common, but it's happened).

Oh, and third, I recall a fellow I used to work with (who I'll leave nameless to protect the guilty) who wrote a pretty nasty WTF and had his email in the javascript source. It took about 3 months before he started getting hate mail from clueful users.

-cw

1) What's wrong with that? If it gets too long and obsolete, just trim it. You also don't ned to comment *every* change; just major changes. I'd rather turn to a guy sitting two desks away and say "Why did you do this?" Than hunt through 2 or 3 years of source control and THEN turn to him. I maintain legacy systems. This is a daily occurrence for me, though I have now leared to identify the developers from the style of the hack and which word(s) they can't spell in comments :)

2) You are identified anyway, by source control.

3) If you let the users see your source code, and put a developer's email address in there, then you deserve everything you get...

the_saint · 2006-05-23 Reply Admin

--He he he

BEGIN

-- Do Stuff

EXCEPTION
WHEN OTHERS THEN -- Completely mask the preceding error
ABORT_PROCEDURE;

END;

2006-05-23 Reply Admin

Forget Dikkens sir, I have proof that the wall is indeed 4ft

http://www.mlchapel.org/photogallery/04Apr/bof/corner%20of%20cbloc%204ft%20wall418.jpg

2006-05-23 Reply Admin

Regarding all the comments about putting comments in your code/cvs. I recently finished working for a client, where you were never supposed to remove code, even for major changes, instead, just comment it out with a defect number, description & date.
This just about worked in the proc, except for where I had to do major rewrites (nasty with the lack of highlighting in vi), but absolutely horrific in the eGate editor. There would be huge swathes of collaboration that had been 'commented' out by putting in a code statement of '/' and somewhere much further down '*/'. The editor wasn't clever enough to realise this code was a comment, so the only way of finding what had been commented out was by scrolling up and down, hoping you didn't miss the closing comment.
If I had to do a fix, or work out what was going on, I normally just copied the code into metapad and deleted the comments which made it a lot easier to read/modify. Then I'd have to make the changes back into the collaboration...

2006-05-23 Reply Admin

Anonymous:
That's why I love that the Toroise SVN plug in names the compare with earlier version function "Blame"

The TortoiseSVN folks did not invent that, they took it from the name of the command it invokes: "svn blame". Subversion, again, took it from "cvs blame" (which is a synonym for "cvs annotate").

2006-05-23 Reply Admin

maybe he wasn't refering to such a harmless overflow. MAYBE he was talking about a stack or heap overflow!

2006-05-23 Reply Admin

xrT:
Anonymous:
Anonymous:
Alex Papadimoulis:
 -- ------------------------- ---------- ------------------------------------------------- ==
 -- M. Bolton 2003-06-09 Changed to DIV0 error instead of overflow error ==
 --==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==--==
Ah, got to love that comment... Fascinating that someone has actually looked at this, and then thought "Divide by zero would be a much prettier way to handle this"
What do you expect from the guy? He is a singer, not a developer.

:)
lol...i was thinking the same thing..."he's a programmer? wtf?!" :p

i guess they're thinking that one day datatypes will increase in size and the forced overflow error would not error out anymore...thus using the division by zero error..

Until mathmeticians/compilers realize that divide by zero is both zero and infinity at the same time...

RyuO · 2006-05-23 Reply Admin

ammoQ:
foxyshadis:

No one brought this up yet? How, exactly, do you get a COMMIT LOG from a set of STORED PROCEDURES? Unless you have a diabolical DBA who runs every update through source control before uploading it, how do you get people to not abuse it? Or has cvs/svn been extended inside databases while I wasn't looking? (I know a couple have proprietary code control.)

I think it could somehow be done with Oracle's system triggers but the best and easiest way is to prevent programmers from creating/replacing stored procedures directly in the (staging / productive) database; instead of that, scripts to create/replace stored procedure are checked out from the CVS and run in a "build" process.

For my personal needs, I have configured SlickEdit (my favourite PL/SQL editor) to load the previous version of a stored procedure from the database and append it to a save file before actually compiling the stored procedures. (Yes, that means 10 versions of the procedure if I need 10 attempts to fix all syntax errors, but who cares, disk space is cheap)
This way, even if one of my undisciplined coworkers makes changes directly in the database, his version is saved so I can compare/merge it if the collission is detected. By far not perfect, but a life-saver anyway.

Assuming you mean the development database (developers should not be in the production database), the canonical solution is to keep code in a separate schema whose password is only known by the CM tool. You would also give each developer a personal schema to play around in; Oracle's scope rules give precedence to code in the schema you log in from. In anything but personal schemas, the developer would not have the RESOURCE privilege.

You can't do much about diabolical DBAs except figure out what they did after the fact.

Michael Casadevall · 2006-05-23 Reply Admin

I can't even think any possible way to even JUSTIFY this one! I mean, the author obviously knows what a stored proceedure is, but he thinks a good way to get out of running proceedure is to call another proceedure which causes the other one to abort with an error. Argh, its too early for this ... my mind, it can't take it this morning.

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