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Table Functions and Cursor Expressions

O'ReillyNet: “ In this article, authors introduce cursor expressions and then show how those expressions can be utilized with table functions.”

I think PL/SQL is beginning to look like Perl now. Yes, it helps write lesser lines of code, but there are too many ways to do simple things.

SELECT A.*, B.* FROM A, B;

SELECT A.*, B.* FROM A, (SELECT * FROM B) B;

SELECT A.*, (SELECT * FROM B) FROM A;

are all valid now. Actually this was possible in Oracle 8i. Oracle 9i supports similar kind of forms in PL/SQL too.

According to the authors, there are some business benefits.

Since you can create stored procedures in Java, I’m not sure why Oracle finds it necessary to keep adding features to PL/SQL. Well, the topic of this article is just adding existing SQL functionality to PL/SQL; but the good thing about PL/SQL was that the core language was small. I hope Oracle won’t make it voluminous. May be in Oracle 12i, you’ll be able to implement Emacs using PL/SQL.