Book Image

Oracle Advanced PL/SQL Developer Professional Guide

By : Saurabh K. Gupta
Book Image

Oracle Advanced PL/SQL Developer Professional Guide

By: Saurabh K. Gupta

Overview of this book

PL/SQL (Procedural Language/Structured Query Language) is Oracle Corporation's procedural extension language for SQL and the Oracle relational database. Server-side PL/SQL is stored and compiled in the Oracle Database and runs within the Oracle executable. With this guide Oracle developers can work towards accomplishing Oracle 11g Advanced PL/SQL Professional certification, which is the second milestone for developers working at the Associate level. The Oracle Advanced PL/SQL Developer Professional Guide helps you master advanced PL/SQL concepts. Besides the clear and precise explanation on advanced topics, it also contains example code and demonstrations, which gives a sense of application and usage to readers.The book gives a deep insight that will help transform readers from mid-level programmers to professional database developers. It aims to cover the advanced features of PL/SQL for designing and optimizing PL/SQL code.This book starts with an overview of PL/SQL as the programming database language and outlines the benefits and characteristics of the language. The book then covers the advanced features that include PL/SQL code writing using collections, tuning recommendations using result caching, implementing VPD to enforce row level security, and much more. Apart from programming, the book also dives deep into the usage of the development tool SQL Developer, employing best practices in database environments and safeguarding the vulnerable areas in PL/SQL code to avoid code injection.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Oracle Advanced PL/SQL Developer Professional Guide
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Collections—a comparative study


In this section, we will compare the available collection types and also throw light on the considerable points to select the appropriate collection type in the database.

Common characteristics of collection types

All three forms of collection types oblige to certain characteristics under all situations. Let us check out some of the common properties of collection types:

  • Persistent collection types can be passed as a formal argument to database stored subprograms. Local collection types and non-persistent collection types can be used for local subprograms only.

  • Collection types can be used as a RETURN type of a function.

  • Due to the object-oriented behavior of persistent collection types—nested tables and varrays—the PL/SQL variables must be initialized by either of the following ways:

    • Use the default collection constructor during declaration or in the executable section

    • Assign a NOT NULL collection to the uninitialized collection variable

    • Fetch data from the database...