1.What is PL/SQL?
PL/SQL is a procedural language that has both interactive SQL and procedural programming language constructs such as iteration, conditional branching.
2.What is the basic structure of PL/SQL?
PL/SQL uses block structure as its basic structure. Anonymous blocks or nested blocks can be used in PL/SQL.
3.What are the components of a PL/SQL block?
A set of related declarations and procedural statements is called block.
4.What are the components of a PL/SQL Block?
Declarative part, Executable part and Execption part.
5.What are the datatypes a available in PL/SQL?
Some scalar data types such as
NUMBER, VARCHAR2, DATE, CHAR, LONG, BOOLEAN.
Some composite data types such as RECORD & TABLE.
6.What are % TYPE and % ROWTYPE? What are the advantages of using these over datatypes?
% TYPE provides the data type of a variable or a database column to that variable.
% ROWTYPE provides the record type that represents a entire row of a table or view or columns selected in the cursor.
The advantages are: I. need not know about variable’s data type
ii. If the database definition of a column in a table changes, the data type of a variable changes accordingly.
7.What is difference between % ROWTYPE and TYPE RECORD ?
% ROWTYPE is to be used whenever query returns a entire row of a table or view.
TYPE rec RECORD is to be used whenever query returns columns of different table or views and variables.
E.g. TYPE r_emp is RECORD (eno emp.empno% type,ename emp ename %type );
e_rec emp% ROWTYPE
Cursor c1 is select empno,deptno from emp;
e_rec c1 %ROWTYPE.
8.What is PL/SQL table?
Objects of type TABLE are called “PL/SQL tables”, which are modelled as (but not the same as) database tables, PL/SQL tables use a primary PL/SQL tables can have one column and a primary key.
9.What is a cursor? Why Cursor is required?
Cursor is a named private SQL area from where information can be accessed.
Cursors are required to process rows individually for queries returning multiple rows.
10. Explain two virtual tables available at the time of database trigger execution.
Table columns are referred as THEN.column_name and NOW.column_name.
For INSERT related triggers, NOW.column_name values are available only.
For DELETE related triggers, THEN.column_name values are available only.
For UPDATE related triggers, both Table columns are available.
