Probably Simple Question - Execute immediate - confused by sytax

Oracle, Sybase, Ingres & Informix all have an "EXECUTE IMMEDIATE" command with slight variations. I get the idea, we immediately parse and excute some dynamic SQL, PL/SQL block etc., Makes sense to me. But, do I have a choice? I can't just use "EXECUTE" can I? The only way I can think of to *not* parse and immediately execute a piece of dynamic SQL is to use dbms_sql and then I can parse and then execute a half hour later if I want. In other words, an "EXECUTE IMMEDIATE" command syntactically implies to me that there is an EXECUTE command with a few variations - like maybe EXECUTE DEFFERED, EXECUTE SOMEOTHERTIME.. etc., but they don't seem to exist. Some it seems to be a two word command with no variations - is this correct? For example, I can't alter database datafile drop.. I can only offline drop, or offline.. So.. after this meandering, I guess my question is are there any variations to this syntax? Is it faster then dbms_sql.parse dbms_sql.execute etc.,, ?

Little confused
Thanks,
D Received on Thu May 17 2001 - 23:02:03 CDT