Database Tools

The PL/SQL Web Toolkit, a set of packages, procedures, and functions that directly interface with the mod_plsql module included with Apache is discussed in Chapter 7, but there are many enhancements to the PL/SQL language and Oracle s support of SQL in Application Server 10 g that are mentioned here. Some of the major SQL enhancements include:

• Operators, functions, and constraints for new, native floating point datatypes

• The introduction of regular expression support

• Performance and size limit of large objects (LOBs) has been enhanced

Some of the major PL/SQL enhancements include:

• A rewritten, optimizing PL/SQL code generator for the PL/SQL Virtual Machine (PVM)

• Support for binary_float and binary_double datatypes

• Built-ins to support regular expression manipulation: regexp_like, regexp_instr, regexp_substr, and regexp_replace

• Multiset operations on nested table instances, supporting operations like equals, union, intersect, except, member

• Support for a user -defined quote character

• INDICES OF and VALUES OF syntax for FORALL