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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 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
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.