As in any programming language, good practices help to ensure that code is developed properly and in a maintainable fashion; PL/SQL is no exception. Developing readable, understandable, and maintainable PL/SQL requires that developer take into account several basic concepts for good development. Several of the common best practices follow:

Coding Standards

The purpose of a coding standard, of course, is not to make your code "better" in some abstract way (thought it might), but rather to make it look more like other code, so that people reading it can more easily make sense of it, and so people changing it can do so in a way that does not make it less readable - which would make it less maintainable.

"Coding Standards are a part of defect prevention. They gather rules, advice and best practices for developing software, especially the code writing part." — OpenOffice.org wiki

All standards are arbitrary.

Naming Conventions and Naming Standards

Well-chosen identifiers make it significantly easier for subsequent generations of analysts and developers to understand what the system is doing and how to fix or extend the source code for new business needs.

A good naming standard provides several benefits.

1. It helps you understand the purpose and usage of the things named.
2. It takes away the uncertainty you would otherwise experience when creating new names. This makes naming go faster and be more deterministic.
3. When multiple programmers on large projects use the same standard, their names for similar things will tend to converge - thus, when two people are designing similar objects, they will notice each other because of the similarity of names. This increases the odds they will be able to merge their work.

WARNING: Never use a variable name that is the same as a column name.

See this page for example standards.

Code Structure

Debugging

Profiling/Tracing

Exception Handling