A developer was writing a script to set up some configuration data via script. He complained that the script was completing successfully, but the data was not getting inserted. He asked for help. His thought was that the success should mean that the records should be inserted.Immediately I pointed out that running the script and seeing success means that the script did not throw any exceptions that were not caught. We looked at his script and saw that it was eating any exceptions. The developer floudered around some more. I later advised him to forget about the script, move over to SQL*Plus, and manually execute the SQL statements one at a time.
Bingo. In SQL*Plus, he found that some constraints were being violated and causing exceptions to be thrown. This taught me two things. You shouuld not jump to the script until you are sure your raw SQL is good. You should also not rely on some tool to execute your script if you are not in full command of what it is doing.
