August 2002
Intermediate to advanced
528 pages
10h 12m
English
This chapter continues the discussion of PL/SQL. The first chapter section covers the code block exception section, which is used to trap errors. The remainder of the chapter will cover named procedures, which are code blocks that have a name and that reside within the database. The most important of these, from the viewpoint of a data administrator, is a function. Functions return a value to the calling statement, thereby allowing the data administrator to calculate a host of special values such as employee age, employee seniority, or average department costs. Function values can be returned in a SELECT statement. A very effective technique is to add functions to the SELECT statement ...