December 2002
Intermediate to advanced
928 pages
85h 29m
English
Data structures declared within a package specification or body, but outside any procedure or function in the package, are known as package data. The scope of package data is your entire session; it spans transaction boundaries, so package data essentially constitutes the globals for your programs.
Keep the following guidelines in mind as you work with package data:
The state of your package variables is not affected by COMMITs and ROLLBACKs.
A cursor declared in a package has global scope. It remains open until you close it explicitly or your session ends.
A good practice is to hide your data structures in the package body and provide “get and set” programs to read and write that data.