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

PL/SQL collection methods


Oracle provides a set of methods which can be used in conjunction with collections in PL/SQL blocks. These methods access a collection type variable and perform relevant activities such as extension, trimming, and deleting collection elements. Besides these activities, few methods also provide information about the collection such as COUNT and EXISTS. These utilities are known as collection methods and they are not a built-in subprogram, because they can be used exclusively in conjunction with collections.

The common syntax for all the collection methods is as follows:

[COLLECTION].METHOD (PARAMETERS)

EXISTS

The EXISTS function checks the existence of an element in a collection. The general syntax of this function is EXISTS(<index>). It takes the subscript as an input argument and searches it in the collection. If the element corresponding to the index is found, it returns TRUE or else, returns FALSE. It is the only method which doesn't raise any exception during...