For the past ten years, O'Reilly's Oracle PL/SQL Programming has been the bestselling book on PL/SQL, Oracle's powerful procedural language. Packed with examples and helpful recommendations, the book has helped everyone--from novices to experienced developers, and from Oracle Forms developers to database administrators--make the most of PL/SQL.

The fourth edition is a comprehensive update, adding significant new content and extending coverage to include the very latest Oracle version, Oracle Database 10g Release 2. It describes such new features as the PL/SQL optimizing compiler, conditional compilation, compile-time warnings, regular expressions, set operators for nested tables, nonsequential collections in FORALL, the programmer-defined quoting mechanism, the ability to backtrace an exception to a line number, a variety of new built-in packages, and support for IEEE 754 compliant floating-point numbers.

The new edition adds brand-new chapters on security (including encryption, row-level security, fine-grained auditing, and application contexts), file, email, and web I/O (including the built-in packages DBMS_OUTPUT, UTL_FILE, UTL_MAIL, UTL_SMTP, and UTL_HTTP) and globalization and localization.

Co-authored by the world's foremost PL/SQL authority, Steven Feuerstein, this classic reference provides language syntax, best practices, and extensive code, ranging from simple examples to complete applications--making it a must-have on your road to PL/SQL mastery. A companion web site contains many more examples and additional technical content for enhanced learning.

• Programming in PL/SQL
  • Introduction to PL/SQL
  • Creating and running PL/SQL code
  • Language fundamentals
• PL/SQL program structure
  • Conditional and sequential control
  • Iterative processing with loops
  • Exception handlers
• PL/SQL program data
  • Working with program data
  • Strings
  • Numbers
  • Dates and timestamps
  • Records
  • Collections
  • Miscellaneous datatypes
• SQL in PL/SQL
  • DML and transaction management
  • Data retrieval
  • Dynamic SQL and dynamic PL/SQL
• PL/SQL application construction
  • Procedures, functions, and parameters
  • Packages
  • Triggers
  • Managing PL/SQL code
  • I/O and PL/SQL
• Advanced PL/SQL topics
  • Application security and PL/SQL
  • Inside PL/SQL
  • Globalization and localization in PL/SQL
  • Object-oriented aspects of PL/SQL
  • Calling Java from PL/SQL
  • External procedures
  • A Regular expression metacharacters and function parameters
  • B Number format models
  • C Data format models