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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

Anchored Declarations

Use the %TYPE attribute to anchor the datatype of a scalar variable (which contains a single value) either to another variable or to a column in a database table or view. Use %ROWTYPE to anchor a declaration to a cursor or table.

The following block shows several variations of anchored declarations:

DECLARE
   tot_sales NUMBER(20,2);
   -- Anchor to a PL/SQL variable.
   monthly_sales tot_sales%TYPE;

   -- Anchor to a database column.
   v_ename employee.last_name%TYPE;

   CURSOR mycur IS
      SELECT * FROM employee;

   -- Anchor to a cursor.
   myrec mycur%ROWTYPE;

The NOT NULL clause on a variable declaration (but not on a database column definition) can follow the %TYPE anchoring and requires anchored declarations to have a default in their declaration. The default value for an anchored declaration can be different from that for the base declaration.

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596003366Errata Page