Chapter 16. Stored Code

Chapter Objectives

In this Chapter, you will learn about:

Gathering Stored Code Information

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.