In Chapter 11 you learned about procedures, in Chapter 12 you learned about functions, and in Chapter 13 you learned about the process of grouping functions and procedures into a package. Now you will learn more about what it means to have code bundled into a package. There are numerous data dictionary views that can be accessed to gather information about the objects in a package. Functions in packages are also required to meet additional restrictions in order to be used in a SELECT statement. In this chapter, you learn what they are and how to enforce them. You will also learn an advanced technique to overload a function or procedure so that it executes different code, depending on the type of the parameter passed in. |