Write code for a living? Feeling kind of lazy? Then maybe you should find a way to generate some code. That's the focus of this blog post. The bulk processing feature of PL/SQL was introduced a long, long time ago. It lets us, among other things, do this: Lovely, concise syntax. One downside, however, is that the target collection in the BULK COLLECT INTO clause must be indexed by integer (which means all nested tables and varrays, but only INDEX BY - associative array - collections that are index by PLS_INTEGER or variations therein). This means that if you do want to use a string-indexed collection, you need to first "dump" it into an integer-indexed array, and then move it over to a string-indexed array. I've done this, and my code usually looks like this: DECLARE CURSOR c IS select last_name, first_name, employee_id from employees where department_id = 30; TYPE t IS TABLE OF c%ROWTYPE; c_limit CONSTANT PLS_INTEGER := 10...
For the last twenty years, I have managed to transform an obsession with PL/SQL into a paying job. How cool is that?