Error message numbers... [LWN.net]

Error message numbers...

Posted Oct 3, 2007 19:08 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Error message numbers... by hummassa
Parent article: Reviving linux-tiny

Speaking as someone who uses Oracle every day, they're bloody awful. Oh
look, I got an ORA-xxyy complaining about some column in a big query.
Which column? Oh, look, even though the RDBMS knows it refuses to tell me
because there's no way to fit that into its precious bloody message
number.

And so on.

I'd say that 25% of my error-message-revealed bug-fixing time is spent
figuring out just what the hell the system is actually trying to tell me,
entirely because of this problem.

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[ot] sqlplus or oracle developer

Posted Oct 22, 2007 23:32 UTC (Mon) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

use one of sqlplus or oracle developer to repeat your query, they usually 
mark the right spot where the error ocurred.

[ot] sqlplus or oracle developer

Posted Oct 23, 2007 13:09 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Very amusing, well done.

(they always mark *a* spot, often an entirely different one. I don't 
castigate them for this: parser error recovery is notoriously difficult. 
But the numbered-error-messages thing just makes everything so much harder 
than it should be...)