Skip to Main Content
Oracle in a Nutshell
book

Oracle in a Nutshell

by Rick Greenwald, David C. Kreines
December 2002
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
928 pages
85h 29m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Oracle in a Nutshell

Types of Blocks

There are two basic types of blocks:

Anonymous block

Cannot be called from outside of the block that contains it. Optional declaration section begins with the keyword DECLARE. This type of block has the following form:

DECLARE
   today DATE DEFAULT SYSDATE;
BEGIN
   -- Display the date. 
   DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE ('Today is ' || today);
END;
Named block

Requires a header. Can be called outside of the block that contains it. Does not use the keyword DECLARE for the declaration section. This type of block is shown in the following example:

CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE show_the_date
IS
   today DATE DEFAULT SYSDATE;
BEGIN
   -- Display the date. 
   DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE ('Today is ' || today);
END show_the_date;

You can declare parameters for a block in the header section. Parameters are optional, enclosed by parentheses, and comma-separated. Each parameter name must be followed by a datatype.

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Oracle Internals

Oracle Internals

Donald K. Burleson
Oracle PL/SQL

Oracle PL/SQL

Lewis Cunningham
Oracle Essentials: Oracle9i, Oracle8i and Oracle8, Second Edition

Oracle Essentials: Oracle9i, Oracle8i and Oracle8, Second Edition

Rick Greenwald, Robert Stackowiak, Jonathan Stern

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596003366Errata Page