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

Subtypes


The Oracle data type is one of the fundamental concepts of the database. Every element, or piece of data in the database, has its own basic behavioral pattern, which is known as data type. An element can be numeric, string, periodic, Boolean or large object. Scalar data types are the original data types which are not derivatives of any other types. Scalar data types constitute a family of base types and their subtypes.

PL/SQL is open to all categories of SQL data types. In addition to available SQL data types, PL/SQL maintains its own data types, most of which are subtypes of SQL data types. We will extend our discussion on these subtypes now.

The following table shows the base types and subtypes under each scalar data types:

Number

Character

Date/Time

Boolean

NUMBER

VARCHAR

DATE

BOOLEAN

DECIMAL/DEC

VARCHAR2

INTERVAL

 

DOUBLE PRECISION

NVARCHAR2

TIMESTAMP

FLOAT

CHAR

 

INTEGER/INT

NCHAR

NUMERIC

CHARACTER

REAL

LONG

SMALLINT...