HELP: Output from within Stored Procedure???

I apologize in advance if this question is addressed in a FAQ somewhere. I am an Oracle newbie and under a deadline, so I need to find an answer as quickly as possible.

I am trying to write some stored procedures to do various queries and output the results, via STDOUT, so they can be parsed by a PERL script.

I want to do something similar to the following:

create procedure display_user (social_security_no char) as

    user_rec user_accounts%rowtype;
begin

    select * into user_rec from user_accounts where ssn = social_security_no ;
    printf ("User Name = %s\n", user_rec.user_name);
    printf ("SSN       = %s\n", user_rec.ssn);

The problem is, I can't find the any statements in SQLPLUS that will allow me to output to to STDOUT. I can use SQL queries invoked via shell scripts that do the select, but in our application many queries are needed and it is quite slow that way.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

Ken Childress
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
kchildre_at_uccs.jpl.nasa.gov

P.S. Please email as well as post any suggestions. Thanks. Received on Tue May 07 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST