By Paul Rony on 3/22/2006 10:47 PM

While working on a component that will allow the SplendidCRM installation utility to update an existing database, we ran across an obscure Oracle bug.  Here is the error:

            PLS-00103: Encountered the symbol "" when expecting one of the following:     return

 

The error prevented all of our functions in Oracle to compile fine, but be marked as Invalid.  This had a cascading effect of causing our views in Oracle to generate an compiler error stating that a dependent function was invalid.

 

After hours of research and experimentation, we narrowed the problem down to the use of the carriage-return line-feed pair (CRLF) that is common to text files used on the Windows platform.  Whereas the rest of the world generally treats the CRLF pair as whitespace, Oracle does not.

 

The solution was to simply replace CRLF with LF before creating executing the scripts in Oracle.

 

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By Paul Rony on 3/6/2006 11:08 PM

On March 6, 2006, SugarCRM officially acknowledged the threat posed by SplendidCRM. It has done so by deleting all posts that reference or mention SplendidCRM on their forums.

We could not think of a better way to be acknowledged as worthy adversary.

As we bow to show mutual respect, we simply say to John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM, "thanks".

By Paul Rony on 3/1/2006 12:13 AM

Here is the quote from their web site:

"Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE) is an entry-level, small-footprint database based on the Oracle Database 10g Release 2 code base that's free to develop, deploy, and distribute; fast to download; and simple to administer."

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/xe/index.html

We are currently testing against Oracle 10g Release 2, so we are not expecting any additional development effort.  We will, however, need to create a new VMware instance and regression test against XE.

It is a good thing we are developing a regression testing tool, because we have a bunch of databases to support:

SQL Server 2000 SQL Server 2005 Oracle Database 9i Oracle Database 10g Oracle Database XE IBM DB2 Express-C MySQL 5 We would add Ingres to the list, but they do not support User-Defined Functions.

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