Oracle PL/SQL Programming: A Developer's Workbook

Chapter 11. DML and Transaction Management

You can embed any of the Data Manipulation Language statements—such as INSERTs, UPDATEs, DELETEs, and SELECTs—inside your PL/SQL programs. You can also combine these statements into an “all or nothing” unit of work called a transaction. The basic idea is that once you begin an operation (for example, once you delete all the employees from a table), you must complete an entire set of operations before any changes are committed, or saved, to the database. If anything interrupts the logical flow (for example, a database error), the entire transaction is rolled back to its starting point. Oracle provides a number of commands that allow you to manage transactions, such as COMMIT, ROLLBACK, SAVEPOINT, and SET TRANSACTION. This chapter tests your ability to use these and other statements to precisely control transactions inside PL/SQL.

Tip

DML (Data Manipulation Language) refers to those statements in SQL that allow you to manipulate or modify the contents of your data. DDL (Data Definition Language) statements (such as CREATE TABLE), on the other hand, modify the definition of your data structures, rather than their contents.

Beginner

11-1.	What SQL statements do you execute to make changes to the contents of tables? Which of these statements are allowed in PL/SQL?
11-2.	Which of the following statements are true, and which are false? When a PL/SQL block finishes execution, it always saves any changes made in that block. Even when an exception is raised ...