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

Determining identifier types and usages


All the local declarations of a program unit are categorized as identifiers. An identifier's declaration locates a memory on the server and keeps it busy until the program unit is executed or terminated. Redundant identifiers must be recognized within a program so as to restrict them from holding a chunk of memory for no operation.

Oracle provides a tool known as PL/Scope to monitor the activities of identifiers in a program. It is one of the new features in Oracle 11g.

The PL/Scope tool

The PL/Scope tool compiles and captures the information of the identifiers declared and used in a program. Once the feature is enabled, the language compiler filters out the identifier's information and stores it in a dictionary view called USER_IDENTIFIERS. An identifier is recognized by its name, type, and usage.

Let us examine some of the key features of the PL/Scope tool:

  • Only unwrapped program units can use the PL/Scope tool.

  • The feature can be enabled by setting...