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This article summarizes the methods for performing simple date/time calculations in Oracle and PL/SQL.
The basics
First of all, there are two data types in Oracle: DATE and TIMESTAMP. The primary difference between two of them is that TIMESTAMP supports higher time precision - up to 10-9 seconds. DATE values can be created by parsing a string [...]
Quite frequently the people who have to work with PL/SQL and who have some experience with other programming languages (like me) are looking for familiar mechanisms to solve their problems. One of these mechanism is dynamic evaluation of the language expressions commonly used in Unix shell, Perl and other languages. It actually turns out that [...]
Using stored procedures and functions when working with the database server has a number of advantages: it allows to abstract and externalize the implementation of certain data-crunching algorithms, may sometimes simplify the transaction processing and may reduce the overhead caused by the complex operation since there is less data to convert/serialize. It may also make [...]
Exception handling mechanism is a very important feature of PL/SQL. In most of the cases it is much simpler to just attempt an operation and properly handle the expected failure rather than to check for the conditions before attempting an operation. For example: it is much easier to unconditionally attempt to drop a table and [...]