Java™ Oracle® Database Development

Program Elements

Now that we've seen the basic elements of PL/SQL, we can start to put them together to build programs. Although we will start by writing anonymous blocks, as we'll see later, what we learn here can be easily extended to functions, procedures, and triggers.

An anonymous block has the following format:

[DECLARE
  variable declarations]
BEGIN
  executable statements
[EXCEPTION
  exception handlers]
END;

The first section, beginning with the keyword DECLARE, is where we declare any variables we will use in our program. The next section, beginning with the word BEGIN, is where we put the statements to be executed normally. The final section is where we provide exception handlers to be executed in case of errors.

Declarations

Before we ...