Re: stored procedures?

Mike wrote:

> I have used oracle's pl/sql in the past for stored procedures. I
> was asked yesterday to explain what stored procedures are and I
> wondered are there other languages that are supported for stored
> procedures in oracle as they are in postgres? Meaning postgres
> supports it's internal procedural language, and java, and perl,
> and tcl. I know oracle supports its own internal procedural
> language and I think also java. Does it also support something
> like cobol?
>
> Mike

Stored procedures are libraries of business logic and utilities that are stored in the database environment which can be triggered in response to one or more events:

• through traditional database triggers (eg: response to table events, such as insert, update, delete);
• manually;
• through external events.

_Oracle can store PL/SQL and Java._ These can in turn call out of the database to .DLLs and .SOs (Shared Objects) using the included EXTPROC capability.

Oracle inherently supports external events such as:

• Workflow steps (based on Oracle Workflow - included with the database)
• Messages (based on the included Oracle Advanced Queueing), which interfaces to JMS, IBM's MQ Series, MS-MQ, etc)
• scheduled jobs (using Oracle's included DBMS_JOB sched package)
• HTTP requests (using the built-in HTTP server and mod_plsql).

Some examples of Oracle's supplied Stored Procedures are:

• Message Queue
• Workfow
• File I/O (UTL_FILE)
• Large Object I/O
• XML interaction (such as parsing)
• web page generation (UTL_HTTP)
• job scheduling (DBMS_JOBS)

For more, look at "Supplied Java Packages Reference" and "Supplied PL/SQL Packages and Types Reference" at http://docs.oracle.com (go to database version of choice, View Library, List Books)

HTH
/Hans Received on Wed Jul 21 2004 - 18:39:59 CDT