Oracle PL/SQL Programming, 6th Edition

Part III. PL/SQL Program Data

Just about every program you write will manipulate data—and much of that data is local to (i.e., defined in) your PL/SQL procedure or function. This part of the book concentrates on the various types of program data you can define in PL/SQL, such as numbers (including the datatypes introduced in Oracle Database 11g), strings, dates, timestamps, records, collections, XML datatypes, and user-defined datatypes. Chapter 7 through Chapter 13 also cover the various built-in functions provided by Oracle that allow you to manipulate and modify data.