Non-Persistent Types

Today I had need to add some new functionality to my Oracle Spatial PL/SQL packages (will be available for download from my website soon).

I wrote the new functions and tested them against 10.2. But the deployment version was 9.2.

Problems occurred!

I could isolate the new functions in 10g SDO_UTIL but not in previous versions OK, but I got pretty annoyed when I discovered that the MDSYS.VERTEX_TYPE at 9.2 changed at 10.x.

At 9.2 MDSYS.VERTEX_TYPE is:

SQL> describe mdsys.vertex_type;

Name Null? Type
---- ----- ------
   X       NUMBER
   Y       NUMBER
   Z       NUMBER
   W       NUMBER

But at 10g it is:

SQL> describe mdsys.vertex_type;

Name Null? Type
---- ----- ------
   X       NUMBER
   Y       NUMBER
   Z       NUMBER
   W       NUMBER
  ID       NUMBER

What a pain!

All of which seems to reinforce my prejudice that persistent data structures are more stable than API based structures.