Chapter 5. Fetch!
In the past few chapters, we've made quite a bit of progress learning the fundamentals of the PL/SQL language, and we've had some fun creating simple web pages that will call PL/SQL programs. But we haven't yet had much of a chance to retrieveinformation from the database into PL/SQL. Why not? Isn't reading data easier than creating it? It would be, except for the fact that you have to deal with lots of rows, one at a time.
This chapter explains how to get data from the database into your stored programs. We will explore:
Putting simple SELECT statements into your program, whether they retrieve zero or one or more rows
Incorporating these techniques into the creation of a web-based search application for the library system, introducing a technique called native dynamic SQL
An overview of more advanced topics such as concurrency control, performance, and sophisticated queries using the Oracle Text facility