Advanced Oracle PL/SQL Programming with Packages

1.3. What Are the Benefits of Packages?

Before exploring the architecture of packages and how best to build them, let's look at some of the most important benefits of the package.

1.3.1. Enforced Information Hiding

When you build a package, you decide which of the package elements are public (can be referenced outside of the package) and which are private (available only within the package itself). You also can restrict access to the package to only the specification. In this way, you use the package to hide the implementation details of your programs. This is most important when you want to isolate the most volatile aspects of your application, such as platform dependencies, frequently changing data structures, and temporary workarounds.

1.3.2. Object-Oriented Design

While PL/SQL does not yet offer full object-oriented capabilities, packages do offer the ability to follow many object-oriented design principles. The package gives developers very tight control over how the modules and data structures inside the package can be accessed.

You can, therefore, embed all the rules about your entities (whether they are database tables or memory-based structures), and access to them, in the package. Since this is the only way to work with that entity, you have in essence created an abstracted and encapsulated object.

1.3.3. Top-Down Design

A package's specification can be written before its body. You can, in other words, design the interface to the code hidden in the package ...