Chapter 9Using Procedures, Functions, and Packages

In the last chapter, we discussed the details of creating procedures, packages, and functions. In this chapter, we will look at some of their features, including the difference between stored and local subprograms, how stored subprograms interact with the data dictionary, and how to call stored subprograms from SQL statements. We will also examine some features of stored subprograms new in Oracle9i and Oracle10g. The examples we use are dependent on database tables found in tables.sql. We need to run tables.sql before testing the example files. We will examine triggers in Chapter 10.

Subprogram Locations

Subprograms and packages can be stored in the data dictionary, as all of the examples in ...

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