Book Excerpt: "Expert Oracle PL/SQL"

xperienced PL/SQL programmers and Oracle developers will learn to master Oracle's procedural extension to industry-standard SQL. "Expert Oracle PL/SQL" should help you become expert at developing robust, high-performance enterprise applications with PL/SQL. Detailed examples describe the practical aspect of each feature, and provide ideas to the reader of how they can best exploit the functionality.

You'll learn how to write dynamic PL/SQL programs, interface with Oracle databases, execute complex calculations, and handle error conditions using advanced techniques. Plus, you'll get the latest on the PL/SQL Toolkit, Java integration, code threading, and performance optimizing. Oracle professionals Ron Hardman and Michael McLaughlin cover all the bases, providing real-world examples, undocumented tricks, syntax samples, and unique solutions for every topic.

Compile high performance PL/SQL scripts using procedures, functions, packages and triggers

Trap, trace, identify, and eliminate compile-time and runtime errors

Manage error propagation, stacks, regular expressions, and metacharacters

Exploit definer's-rights and invoker's-rights architectures

Extend PL/SQL functionality using server-side and internal Java class libraries

Build and run parallel PL/SQL program units using DBMS_JOB and DBMS_PIPE

Exploit definer's-rights and invoker's-rights architectures

Tune performance using statistics gathering, the PL/SQL optimizer, SQL Trace, DBMS_STATS, and TKPROF

Use Oracle Text with PL/SQL Server Pages to perform theme/gist extraction, highlighting, stemming, fuzzy, and wildcard searching

Administer server-side PL/SQL Toolkit web pages and PL/SQL Server Pages

Secure, encrypt, and transmit data using DBMS_CRYPTO, UTL_COMPRESS, DBMS_DATAPUMP, and DBMS_FILE_TRANSFER

Chapter 5, 'Extending PL/SQL with Java Libraries' explains how to extend PL/SQL to make it be the gate through which data moves to and from Java stored objects. Extending stored programs with Java is a very popular solution, and PL/SQL is essential to the process of stored Java class libraries.

Download the PDF of Chapter 5: 'Extending PL/SQL with Java Libraries'

Reproduced from "Expert Oracle PL/SQL," by permission of McGraw Hill. ISBN 0072261943, copyright 2005. All rights reserved.