And finally the A&DD assignment, or as I call it…well, there are no words for it really and this is growing old anyway.
A&DD stands for “Advanced and Distributed Databases”. Apparently in year 2 there’s a unit called “AD&D”. Yet since I spent the first two years in Germany and not at SSU so many bad jokes were wasted without me even rolling a save. Oh no, he didn’t?! Yeah, I went there!
So the task for the assignment is to evaluate something. More specifically, evaluate one out of four Oracle-related topics. Lukas and I picked “Oracle and XML”.
ORACLE AND XML, good or bad???
The job is basically to first describe what it’s all about for a bit and then design and develop a small test application. Which was just a big bag of laughs. Our magnificent idea was to build a trigger that makes an XML-formatted summary of some other tables whenever they change, think a poor man’s XML-based OLAP. And boy, that man sure is poor. Writing that trigger was a pain in the ass, especially when I tried to do a second one with structured storage. I wonder how people even manage to use all that crap daily with all the great documentation that is…well, not really great. The world needs an “Oracle XML DB for Dummies”-book, stat!
Of course the application turned out to be doing only half of what we envisioned, which will at least make for a nice, angry evaluation. Oh, and the server is slow, too.
Databases are, like, sooo awesome!

And it’s already done! Yay.