Oracle rabbit colonies

  • From: J Buchanan <oracle@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2007 13:27:59 -0500


I've been reading through the Oracle PL/SQL Users Guide and Reference from various years and noticed that the 11g documentation seems to be "lightening up" a little. The jovial and personal tone found in the earlier documentation pretty much dried up and went away with 10g. This is unfortunate as the occasional side-step explanations made reading the older manuals a more interesting.

I do not have access to any documentation prior to 8.0 so I cannot compare the documentation of those releases, however the PL/SQL Users Guide and Reference for versions 8.0 through 9iR2 make mention (in a mere 12 words) of the Fibonacci sequence and how it was used to model the growth of a rabbit colony. The reference to Fibonacci was made within the "Understanding and Using Recursion" section of the manuals. The 8.0 through 9.x have a few code examples that are interesting reads. But 10gR1 and 10gR2 documentation not only omitted the "rabbit colony" reference but also the code examples in that section. The 10g documentation as a whole is rather dry and unexciting and the examples I thought to be useful were ripped out. The 11gR1 documentation managed to squeeze in a recursive function for finding the nth term of a Fibonacci series as a means to demonstrate using RESULT_CACHE. The example procedure "find_staff" disappeared altogether with the 10g documentation. I doubt the cuts were made to conserve space given that the PL/SQL Packages and Types Reference is 5000+ pages long.

Scanning through the other books through other releases follows the same pattern... Oracle must have hired a new manager to preside over the doc writers for 10g ;-)


jason b.
--
//www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l


Other related posts: