Oracle Database 10g New Features (Osborne ORACLE Press Series)

Page 162

Oracle Database 10g comes with a number of new features that are designed to provide enhanced application development functionality within the Oracle database. This chapter covers the following topics related to these new features:

Bulk bind improvements

Collection set operations

Database storage of natively compiled PL/SQL

PL/SQL fine-grained debug privileges

PL/SQL regular expressions

User-specified quote character assignment

The new utl_compress package

The new utl_mail package

PL/SQL compile-time warnings

New PL/SQL compiler

Improvements to the dbms_profiler procedure

Table function enhancements

Bulk Bind Improvements

Bulk bind operations help to improve the performance of PL/SQL operations. Oracle Database 10g offers new functionality associated with bulk binds, including:

Processing of sparse collections

New exception handling

Processing Sparse Collections

Prior to Oracle Database 10g, processing of collections that contained sparse element collections was inefficient. If the save exceptions clause was not specified, then the statement being executed would terminate when it reached the first deleted element. When save exceptions was used, the operation would not fail, but if there were a number of deleted elements, the performance of the process was much worse than it would have been if save exceptions had not been used.