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

Creating LOB data types


Similar to other data types, table columns which are meant for the storage of large data must be declared as one of the LOB data types. This section focuses on the elementary step of LOB handling that is, creation of LOB columns.

Directories

Directory is a vital component in Oracle used to access an operating system file. It interfaces the location path as a directory object. The DBA creates it and grants read/write privileges to the concerned user.

A directory is a nonschema object and can be used as a security barrier for the files located on the server or the client. A directory can be created as per the following syntax:

CREATE DIRECTORY [DIRECTORY NAME] AS [OS LOCATION PATH]

Note that the directory creation does not validate the specified location on the system. This means that a directory can be created for a nonexistent path on the system.

For example, the CREATE DIRECTORY statement, as shown in the following code snippet, creates a directory for the path C:\Labs...