Jim Czuprynski On Cursor Variables As Table Function Arguments
July 3rd, 2004 by Mark Rittman
If you read my posting the other week about
streamlining Oracle 9i ETL
with pipelined table functions, you might be interesting in a related
article for DatabaseJournal entitled
"Using Cursor Variables As Function Arguments on Oracle 9i". According to
the synopsis, "Oracle 9i offers the ability to pass data to a PL/SQL function
in the form of a cursor variable. When this feature is paired with the concept
of the table function, the resulting PL/SQL code increases significantly in
flexibility and scalability. This article builds upon the author’s previous
article on table functions and provides a brief technical explanation of how
best to implement this feature.". It’s all about building table functions
that accept ref cursors (i.e. references to tables of data) as arguments, which
you can then use to output a transformed table of data to then use in your ETL
process.
