Tips&Tricks: How to handle Oracle LONG datatype while working with legacy systems?

This post share some techniques you can try to handle Oracle LONG data type while working with legacy systems. While recently working on integrating one of the legacy system with latest technologies (JPA/Hibernate) we came across some of the challenges in doing the same. Here we will see how to find way around for one of such problem, Oracle LONG data type, or how to get rid of it.

Getting rid of Oracle LONG data type: Depending upon the nature of data you store in the column, you can plan to change the column type

LONG->VARCHAR (If you have limited data, 4000)

LONG->CLOB (for bigger data size)

You can use the below Stored Procedure to convert the column type:

Code Quality: Walk the Talk or Just the selling point?

Some of the mind boggling thoughts that must have come into your mind also like the times when as a developer you compromised on code quality because of tight dead lines etc. or as a team lead or manager you compromised on quality to speed up the delivery or because of risk management to reach the milestone. May be, as a team you started well but what it costs to keep up the pace for the code quality. There are many varied factors around it and we will have a brief look at it and will see how it works in the end.

To start with, we all know about the code quality significance and the long term benefits or implications (lets assume ).

Code Quality as Selling point

If we put aside the players in the market to do the job in cheap way and deliver the crap, on broader way we have majorly two kind of players:

ActionScript/Flex/AIR Code Quality Measurement Tools

From a java developer perspective, you would love to have the similar code quality measurement tools for ActionScript/Flex/Air also but there is hardly any single comparable tool available for this. After a long search and analysis, this is what I have found and here we will have a look at what all these tools and different utilities offer.

In this post we will analyze what different code quality metrics on a general basis we would require for ActionScript/Flex/AIR and what are the different available tools to get such metrics.

Code Quality Metrics

We would like to have the metrics to display different information like:

• Coding Styles: The metrics which tell us the different coding style violations inside the code.
• Coding Standards: The metrics which tell us the different coding standards violations inside the code.
• Project level: Total number of packages, interface, classes etc. , the dependencies between different packages and classes and their linking.
• Class level: Total number of lines of code, number of functions, cyclomatic complexity, dependencies on other classes etc.
• Function level: Total number of lines of code, cyclomatic complexity etc. and coverage tools stating if all the lines of code are fully tested on not.

(This is just on broader level, not covering all the metrics and information which similarly we have for java).

List of Available Tools

The available tools for AcrionScript/Flex/Air code quality measurement are:

Presentation: Enterprise Flex using Cairngorm

This post share the presentation “Enterprise Flex using Cairngorm” based on the different posts on flex shared here.

Posts: Flex Category

Presentation: Enterprise Flex using Cairngorm

Feel free to share feedback!!!

Agile: Handling Big-Bang changes in the sprint

This post covers some of the approaches you can plan to handle the Big-Bang changes during the sprint. It may be that some of the ways may not fit exactly to your requirements but you can definitely relate and plan it the best way and to handle the impediments with the right approach in those scenarios to minimize the waste, lean way.

Big-Bang Changes

The term big-bang changes here refer the changes to be done in the critical modules of the application which may be infrastructural, network, integration, data storage layer, service modules or even may be the UI changes.

Sometimes it is hard to predict such changes but once it has to be made then the best way is to plan it the right way.

Different Approaches