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

Parameters

variable_name

Name you want to give the variable. If you stop here and don’t supply a datatype, SQL*Plus displays the datatype for the variable that you have named.

data_type

Datatype of the variable. The following datatypes are allowed:

NUMBER

Results in a floating-point number and is the same as a NUMBER variable in PL/SQL or a NUMBER column in a table. Unlike PL/SQL, SQL*Plus does not let you specify a length or a precision, so a declaration like NUMBER (9,2) is not allowed.

CHAR [( length [CHAR | BYTE])]

Results in a fixed-length character string. The length is optional. If it is omitted, you get a one-byte string.

NCHAR [( length )]

Results in a fixed-length character string in the national character set. The length is optional. If it is omitted, you get a one-character string.

VARCHAR2 ( length [CHAR | BYTE])

Results in a variable-length character string.

NVARCHAR2 ( length )

Results in a variable-length character string using the national language character set.

CLOB

Results in a character large object variable.

NCLOB

Results in a character large object variable using the national language character set.

REFCURSOR

Gives you a cursor variable you can use to return the results of a SQL query from PL/SQL to SQL*Plus.

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