October 2007
Intermediate to advanced
178 pages
2h 50m
English
book
Oracle PL/SQL Language Pocket Reference, 4th Edition
by Steven Feuerstein, Bill Pribyl, Chip Dawes
Content preview from Oracle PL/SQL Language Pocket Reference, 4th Edition
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Built-in Functions and Packages
Oracle Corporation supplies many built-in functions and packages. The following sections describe those used most often by PL/SQL developers.
Built-in Functions
The Oracle database provides dozens of built-in functions. Although most of these functions are available to both SQL and PLSQL, there are some notable exceptions. The DECODE function, for example, is not available to PL/SQL except within SQL statements included in your PL/SQL programs. The Oracle Database SQL Reference contains implementation details for the many functions defined to PL/SQL with the package STANDARD. You can view this package specification within the file stdspec.sql located in the ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin directory on the database server.
Conversion functions
Built-in function | Description |
|---|---|
ASCIISTR(string) | Converts string in any character set to the ASCII version of string in the database character set. |
CAST(expression AS datatype) | Converts expression to type datatype. (Use as a powerful substitute for TO_DATE.) |
CHARTOROWID(string) | Converts string to a ROWID datatype. |
CONVERT(string, destination_character_set, source_character_set) | Converts string from the source character set to the destination character set. (The default source character set is the database character set.) |
FROM_TZ(timestamp_value, time_zone) | Adds time zone information to a TIMESTAMP value (converting it to a TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE value). |
HEXTORAW(string) | Converts string containing hexadecimal characters to its raw equivalent. ... |
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.