Shriek, hook, sh'bang...

There are times when the Internet can throw you a curved ball and you forget everything you learned - "...well it must be true, I saw it on the Internet".

I've recently (like, in the past four years) taken to programming stuff using a SQL Server database where things is slightly different from the Oracle bits I'd done since 1996.

Yesterday, I had a call from a guy in one of the manufacturing plants that still uses a very small portion of "my" old Oracle database.

"Um, we need to track product in a specific way so that we can witch-hunt the shift-crew who are damaging the pallets in transit..."

"Right"

I had a quick trawl through the old, existing code and couldn't find anything that did exactly what he wanted. So, rather than dig out the old Visual Basic (VB) compiler and create something consistent with what he used, I thought I'd knock up a very quick report using SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) - but, rather than using SQL Server, I'd "ODBC" into the Oracle database.

Simples?

Nope.

Well, writing the PL-SQL query was trivial, but I had to pass in the Pallet Number as a parameter. I tried the normal method "PALLET = @PalletNumber". And got "...missing expression".

Ah, I remember, you need to do something different for non-SQL Server. I Google'd for "SSRS passing parameters" and spent a good part of two days reading about how "easy it is" to "substitute the @ for a :" and how some twat called "Yisus Lopz" though it clever to add some completely useless entry about a SELECT statement at the end of every forum post I came across. 

All the report gave me was some damn error message about "...variable not bound" when I used the ":".

A colleague in the office heard me huffing and puffing.

"What's up".

"It's this bloody report, I can't get it to accept a parameter. In the good 'ol Oracle days, we just used to use a "?""



"Ah."



"That'll be it then."

(Note to confused readers, I've tried to make this informative and funny. I don't think I've succeeded in either).