September 1999
Intermediate to advanced
256 pages
7h 5m
English
Content preview from Oracle Web Applications: PL/SQL Developer's IntroBecome 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,
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Chapter 6. PL/SQL
With HTML safely out of the way, we can turn our attention to the second half of our web development platform: PL/SQL, Oracle’s proprietary extension to structured query language (SQL). The PL stands for Procedural Language, since PL/SQL is used to create procedural constructs (loops, variables, etc.) on top of the relational constructs of SQL.
Although it has some object-oriented features, PL/SQL is based largely on Ada, a structured programming language used heavily by the Department of Defense. As such, PL/SQL has more in common with languages like C, Pascal, or COBOL than it does with C++ or Java. Although it follows an older design model (structured versus object), PL/SQL has the advantages of being easy to learn, tightly integrated to the Oracle database, and extensible. If you know how to write a SQL script and know at least one 3GL language, you can learn to develop useful PL/SQL programs in just a few hours.
In the next three sections we’ll cover what you need to know to start developing in PL/SQL: how to structure a PL/SQL program, how to fill in its major programming constructs, and how to create reusable modules called packages. In the last section we’ll look at two third-party tools, TOAD and PL/Formatter, that make PL/SQL development much more enjoyable and productive.
There is much more to say about the PL/SQL language. For complete information, see Steven Feuerstein and Bill Pribyl’s Oracle PL/SQL Programming (O’Reilly & Associates).
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