PL/SQL
Introduction:
PL/SQL stands for Procedural Language extension of SQL.
PL/SQL is a combination of SQL along with the procedural features of programming languages. It was developed by Oracle Corporation in the early 90’s to enhance the capabilities of SQL.
The PL/SQL Engine:
Oracle uses a PL/SQL engine to processes the PL/SQL statements. A PL/SQL code can be stored in the client system (client-side) or in the database (server-side).
A Simple PL/SQL Block:
Each PL/SQL program consists of SQL and PL/SQL statements which from a PL/SQL block.
A PL/SQL Block consists of three sections:
- The Declaration section (optional).
- The Execution section (mandatory).
- The Exception (or Error) Handling section (optional).
Declaration Section:
The Declaration section of a PL/SQL Block starts with the reserved keyword DECLARE. This section is optional and is used to declare any placeholders like variables, constants, records and cursors, which are used to manipulate data in the execution section. Placeholders may be any of Variables, Constants and Records, which stores data temporarily.
Execution Section:
The Execution section of a PL/SQL Block starts with the reserved keyword BEGIN and ends with END. This is a mandatory section and is the section where the program logic is written to perform any task. The programmatic constructs like loops, conditional statement and SQL statements form the part of execution section.
Exception Section:
The Exception section of a PL/SQL Block starts with the reserved keyword EXCEPTION. This section is optional. Any errors in the program can be handled in this section, so that the PL/SQL Blocks terminates gracefully. If the PL/SQL Block contains exceptions that cannot be handled, the Block terminates abruptly with errors.
Every statement in the above three sections must end with a semicolon ; . PL/SQL blocks can be nested within other PL/SQL blocks.
This is how a sample PL/SQL Block looks.
| DECLARE
Variable declaration
BEGIN
Program Execution
EXCEPTION
Exception handling
END; |
Advantages of PL/SQL
These are the advantages of PL/SQL.
- Block Structures: PL SQL consists of blocks of code, which can be nested within each other. Each block forms a unit of a task or a logical module. PL/SQL Blocks can be stored in the database and reused.
- Procedural Language Capability: PL SQL consists of procedural language constructs such as conditional statements (if else statements) and loops like (FOR loops).
- Better Performance: PL SQL engine processes multiple SQL statements simultaneously as a single block, thereby reducing network traffic.
- Error Handling: PL/SQL handles errors or exceptions effectively during the execution of a PL/SQL program. Once an exception is caught, specific actions can be taken depending upon the type of the exception or it can be displayed to the user with a message.
PL/SQL Placeholders
Placeholders are temporary storage area. Placeholders can be any of Variables, Constants and Records. Oracle defines placeholders to store data temporarily, which are used to manipulate data during the execution of a PL SQL block.
Depending on the kind of data you want to store, you can define placeholders with a name and a datatype. Few of the datatypes used to define placeholders are as given below.
Number (n,m) , Char (n) , Varchar2 (n) , Date , Long , Long raw, Raw, Blob, Clob, Nclob, Bfile
PL/SQL Variables
These are placeholders that store the values that can change through the PL/SQL Block.
The General Syntax to declare a variable is:
variable_name datatype [NOT NULL := value ];
- variable_name is the name of the variable.
- datatype is a valid PL/SQL datatype.
- NOT NULL is an optional specification on the variable.
- value or DEFAULT value is also an optional specification, where you can initialize a variable.
- Each variable declaration is a separate statement and must be terminated by a semicolon.
For example, if you want to store the current salary of an employee, you can use a variable.
DECLARE
salary number (6);
* “salary” is a variable of datatype number and of length 6.
When a variable is specified as NOT NULL, you must initialize the variable when it is declared.
For example: The below example declares two variables, one of which is a not null.
DECLARE
salary number(4);
dept varchar2(10) NOT NULL := “HR Dept”;
The value of a variable can change in the execution or exception section of the PL/SQL Block. We can assign values to variables in the two ways given below.
1) We can directly assign values to variables.
The General Syntax is:
variable_name:= value;
2) We can assign values to variables directly from the database columns by using a SELECT.. INTO statement. The General Syntax is:
SELECT column_name INTO variable_name FROM table_name [WHERE condition]; |
Example: The below program will get the salary of an employee with id '1116' and display it on the screen.
DECLARE
var_salary number(6);
var_emp_id number(6) = 1116;
BEGIN
SELECT salary
INTO var_salary
FROM employee
WHERE emp_id = var_emp_id;
dbms_output.put_line(var_salary);
dbms_output.put_line('The employee ' || var_emp_id || ' has salary ' || var_salary);
END;
/
NOTE: The backward slash '/' in the above program indicates to execute the above PL/SQL Block.
Scope of Variables
PL/SQL allows the nesting of Blocks within Blocks i.e, the Execution section of an outer block can contain inner blocks. Therefore, a variable which is accessible to an outer Block is also accessible to all nested inner Blocks. The variables declared in the inner blocks are not accessible to outer blocks. Based on their declaration we can classify variables into two types.
- Local variables - These are declared in a inner block and cannot be referenced by outside Blocks.
- Global variables - These are declared in a outer block and can be referenced by its itself and by its inner blocks.
For Example: In the below example we are creating two variables in the outer block and assigning their product to the third variable created in the inner block. The variable 'var_mult' is declared in the inner block, so cannot be accessed in the outer block i.e. it cannot be accessed after line 11. The variables 'var_num1' and 'var_num2' can be accessed anywhere in the block.
1> DECLARE 2> var_num1 number; 3> var_num2 number; 4> BEGIN 5> var_num1 := 100; 6> var_num2 := 200; 7> DECLARE 8> var_mult number; 9> BEGIN 10> var_mult := var_num1 * var_num2; 11> END; 12> END; 13> / |
