About PL/SQL Versions
There are many versions of PL/SQL, and you may even find that you need to work with multiple versions in your database administration activities.
We assume for this book that Oracle Database 10g is the baseline PL/SQL version. However, where appropriate, we reference specific features introduced (or only available) in other, earlier versions. In cases where a feature is in any way version-dependent—for example, if you can use it only in Oracle Database 10g Release 2—we note that in the text.
Each version of the Oracle database comes with its own corresponding version of PL/SQL. As you use more up-to-date versions of PL/SQL, an increasing array of functionality will be available to you. One of our biggest challenges as users of PL/SQL is simply keeping up. We need to educate ourselves constantly about the new features in each version—figuring out how to use them and how to apply them to our applications, and determining which new techniques are so useful that we should modify existing applications to take advantage of them.
Table P-1 summarizes the major elements in each of the versions (past and present) of PL/SQL in the database. It offers a very high-level glimpse of the new features available in each version.
Tip
The Oracle Developer product suite also comes with its own version of PL/SQL, and it generally lags behind the version available in the Oracle RDBMS itself. This chapter (and the book as a whole) concentrates on server-side PL/SQL.