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Introduction

Welcome to the world of PL/SQL, wish you all a very Happy new year 2009 !!!

In this post we shall kick start our journey into the world of PL/SQL by defining PL/SQL, in the subsequent posts we shall uncover the features and benefits of using this powerful procedural language.

Let’s start by defining “What is PL/SQL?”

PL/SQL (Procedural Language/SQL) is Oracles answer for the need a procedural language to embed SQL statements and execute them within Oracle.

PL/SQL is more powerful than the raw SQL statements, PL/SQL contains structural and conditional statements which enables us to perform a bulk of logical operations using a single call to Oracle, which otherwise would have to be performed at the front end using multiple SQL calls from the front end to Oracle.

The basic unit in PL/SQL is a block. All PL/SQL programs are made up of blocks, which can be nested within each other. Typically, each block performs a logical action in the program. A block has the following structure:

    DECLARE

                /* Variable declaration goes here. */

    BEGIN

                /* SQL Statements, Conditional statements etc goes here */

    EXCEPTION

                /* Exception handling logic goes here. */

    END;