e-Commerce Applications Using Oracle8i and Java from Scratch

Procedural SQL Programming

PL/SQL is essentially an application development language. It adds a number of procedural non-SQL statements to the built-in SQL. PL/SQL can be used to create transactions; in other words, it can be used to group SQL statements, operators, and functions into a block that can be sent to the database as a single unit of work. As a result, PL/SQL reduces network traffic by sending all the statements at once. However, PL/SQL doesn't support the DDL statements and also doesn't support the DCL statements CONNECT, REVOKE, and GRANT. You have to enter these commands directly through a utility (server manager) that doesn't process the commands before sending them to the database server. Table 3.7 shows the most commonly used ...