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Oracle Built in Packages Review by anonymous
excellent source for advanced PL/SQL development
This book is absolutely necessary to get oriented in Oracle documentation. It covers PL/SQL packages that are of major interest both for application developers and those of us who want to automate DBA functions. Wonderful writing and excellent code samples are very helpful!
Some examples of DBA-related packages are DBMS_SQL which takes care of dynamic SQL (chapter 2) and DBMS_JOB for cron-type PL/SQL scripts.
Chapter 3 covers DBMS_PIPE and DBMS_ALERT packages necessary to implement servers running inside Oracle independently from host operating system.
Chapter 6 describes DBMS_OUTPUT and UTL_FILE. DMS_OUTPUT is well-known for its put_line procedure which prints short (up to 256 bytes) strings to SQLPLUS console. However, from this book one can find out how to increase standard overall output size for this package - which may be crucial for testing. UTL_FILE takes care of ASCII file I/O for PL/SQL.
Considering Large Objects management (chapter 8), we remember this is 1998 book, it does not cover latest Oracle object-related features like types or collections. Now ASCII documents (such as news articles) can be kept in VARARRAYs rather than in CLOBs.
ORACLE BUILT-IN PACKAGES is more of a reference than a tutorial, it leaves for the reader to find out what functionality is actually needed and for what technical purpose.