PL/SQL Introduction

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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.

Procedural Language/Structured Query Language (PL/SQL) is Oracle Corporation’s procedural extension language for SQL and the Oracle relational database. PL/SQL’s general syntax resembles that of Ada or Pascal. It is also one of three key programming languages embedded in the Oracle Database, along with SQL itself and Java.

PL/SQL is available in Oracle Database (since version 7), TimesTen in-memory database (since version 11.2.1), and IBM DB2 (since version 9.7).

PL/SQL supports variables, conditions, loops and exceptions. Arrays are also supported, though in a somewhat unusual way, involving the use of PL/SQL collections.

Implementations from version 8 of Oracle Database onwards have included features associated with object-orientation.

Once the program units have been stored into the database, they become available for execution at a later time.

While programmers can readily embed Data Manipulation Language (DML) statements directly into their PL/SQL code using straightforward SQL statements, Data Definition Language (DDL) requires more complex “Dynamic SQL” statements to be written in the PL/SQL code. However, DML statements underpin the majority of PL/SQL code in typical software applications.

In the case of PL/SQL dynamic SQL, early versions of the Oracle Database required the use of a complicated Oracle DBMS_SQL package library. More recent versions have however introduced a simpler “Native Dynamic SQL”, along with an associated EXECUTE IMMEDIATE syntax.

Oracle Corporation customarily extends package functionality with each successive release of the Oracle Database.

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