Re: PL/SQL : How do you echo text to screen ?

tssmith_at_best.com (Tim Smith) writes:

>One serious flaw of the DBMS_OUTPUT package is that there is no way of
>doing an intermediate flush of the output. So if you had code like
>...
>loop ...
> n := n + 1;
> dbms_output.put_line('We are now processing item ' || n);
> -- do something time-consuming
>end loop;
>...
 

>you will not see any output until the PL/SQL process finishes, rather
>than the presumably desired progressive info.

That's more a design question of the Oracle tools. Something like sql*plus etc. does an oexec() OCI call, which blocks until the pl/sql has finished, then it retrieves the dbms_output output if the serveroutput variable is set. There's no nonblocking oexec() or oparse() call, and no mechanism to keep polling for output.

I don't see an easy way to do this anyway, after all it's still client/ server, the code you submit gets executed on the server, then you send some more sql statements to retrieve the output. There's no way to send text to the client while running, no out-of-band data.

R

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