Exception Handling - WHEN OTHERS

Question

Good Day to All,
When i am running a procedure in TOAD-Expert... it says below message.
*'Avoid using a WHEN OTHERS clause in an exception section without any other specific handlers.'*
PROCEDURE...
IS
BEGIN
EXCEPTION
WHEN OTHERS THEN
ROLLBACK;
-- Checking whether cursor is open
   IF cur%ISOPEN THEN
    CLOSE cur;
   END IF;
  UPDATE TABLE
  SET COL..
  WHERE ...
   COMMIT;
   RAISE;
END procedure;

Answer 1

The manner in which you are dealing with the exception is not wrong. Your handler does a couple of things:
- rollbacks the existing transaction as failed
- attempts resource protection (guard against resource leakage)
- logs the error
- re-raises the exception
None of these are invalid actions when dealing with an exception.
A suggestion though - move the UPDATE out of the exception and create a procedure that performs the logging for you (as an autonomous transaction). This way you have a reusable logging code unit that can be called from anywhere in your code.
Resource protection for explicit cursors are also not that critical in PL/SQL - as cursor handles that go out of scope are automatically released. The exception being a ref cursor handle. Of course, you need to resource protect other handles (like socket and file handles). And seeing that PL/SQL does not offer resource protection blocks, the only alternative is to use the "+when OTHERS+" exception handler for that.