Customer Reviews

Oracle Built in Packages

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If you want to take advantage of Oracle's Built-in packages (and you should, if you're doing anything with PL/SQL), this book is a lifesaver. After struggling to follow Oracle's documentation regarding Dynamic SQL in PL/SQL procedures, I spent a few days with this book and was able to understand and utilize the DBMS_SQL package to create some powerful PL/SQL stored procedures. The book (like most of O'Reilly's books) is well-written, and has great examples--something sorely lacking in Oracle's documentation. This and Mr. Feuerstein's other book on PL/SQL "Oracle PL/SQL Programming" are great resources. Look at the O'Reilly Oracle series before you buy similar Oracle Press books.

This book was a definite job saver. The book covers procedures not covered in Oracle documentation and not even known by Oracle support staff. Each package and procedure is indexed and offers at a minimum a brief description and usage of the procedure. I highly recommend the book for anyone trying to implement complex features of Oracle such as replication.

Oracle should just have O'Reilly publish all of their documentation. Though I haven't had a need to use 85% of Oracle's packages, the ones that I have read are thoroughly documented. Even the author (Steve Feuerstein) mentioned that there are even MORE builtin packages that he didn't put into his book. Word is that he may add more of them.

Excellent book.

Gio

This book does an execellent job of covering Oracle's packages. It provides an explanation of how to use them and what they can do. The cdrom included is a wonderful extension to the Revealnet software. This is a definite necessary for every Oracle developer and dba!

This serves as a good reference book. Saved lot of time many, many times. I bought this book 2+ yrs ago and still helps me out. But I think this book needs a major update. Oracle8i is a new beast altogether (I didn't work with 9i yet) and there are tons of new built-in packages that are very useful.

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.

With the exception of their "Oracle Scripts" book, O'Reilly has by far the best books on Oracle in the market. My company and I personally have most of their books. Our staff of DBA's tend to use these first, then move on to the Oracle doc set should we need to. Anyone new to Oracle would be well served to stock up on the O'Reilly series. Same goes for their Nutshell series on Unix.

I code and teach a lot of PL/QL, and this is the only book I have found which goes into any depth on these built-ins. It tells me most everything I want to know. However, you have to dig through tons of sample code from his PL/SQL products. In most cases, you won't find a clear example of the Oracle built-in packages (you know, the ones the book is supposed to be about?). Instead, there are huge, unneccesarily complex examples of how to use the author's bloated code (which is for sale, btw).

There is no doubt he is the foremost author on PL/SQL, but it's not worth digging through the junk and arrogance. To quote the back cover:
"I work with built-in packages every day, and nobody kicks sand in my face-- at least when it comes to PL/SQL!" Given the amount of his own code he buried them under, I doubt he ever even *sees* the Oracle built-ins anymore.
We have used his other books as texts for professional training, and the students have the same complaints. They are better than the manuals which come with Oracle, but not by much. (If you want a good PL/SQL book, check out Oracle PL/SQL Programming by Scott Urman. Doesn't cover built-ins much, but its far better than the Feuerstein PL/SQL or Advanced PL/SQL books).
Summary: Better than the manuals, if you like searching for needles in haystacks.

Very little about Oracle build-in packages. Much more about O'reilly's own build-in packages, it is more like a kind of ads.

I want to use packages, doesn't mean I want O'reilly packages. If you want to sell O'reilly packages, name the book accordingly.

I wanted to know more about the numerous oracle standard build-in packages, this book didn't help me.