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

Executing external C programs from PL/SQL


Oracle extends the architectural support to the external programs in C, C++, Java, or the one whose library is interpretable by C. In the external procedure architecture, we saw the processing steps of an external program. Now, we will list the development steps to run a C program from PL/SQL:

  1. Write a C program and compile it.

  2. Copy the C program's code file in the $ORACLE_HOME\bin\ directory. Generate the DLL using a hardware supported native C compiler.

    Tip

    For demonstration purposes, we will use the MingW (Minimal GNU for Windows) compiler to compile C program and generate the DLLs.

    It can be downloaded from http://www.mingw.org/wiki/Getting_Started.

  3. Configure the Oracle Net service.

  4. Create a PL/SQL library object for the DLL.

  5. Create a call specification in PL/SQL to publish the external program. Specify the external language used in the program (here, it is C), the PL/SQL library name, the method in the external program and the parameters mapped as per...