Jim Czuprynski On Cursor Variables As Table Function Arguments

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.