Obsessed with Oracle PL/SQL

Please do feel encouraged to read this and my other posts on table functions, but you will learn much more about table functions by taking my Get Started with PL/SQL Table Functions class at the Oracle Dev Gym. Videos, tutorials and quizzes - then print a certificate when you are done! From Oracle Help Center (a.k.a., documentation), we read : Data is said to be pipelined if it is consumed by a consumer (transformation) as soon as the producer (transformation) produces it, without being staged in tables or a cache before being input to the next transformation.   Pipelining enables a table function to return rows faster and can reduce the memory required to cache a table function's results.   A pipelined table function can return the table function's result collection in subsets. The returned collection behaves like a stream that can be fetched from on demand. This makes it possible to use a table function like a virtual table. In a nutshell, this means that the ca...

August 2018 update: please do feel encourage to read this and my other posts on table functions, but you will learn much more about table functions by taking my Get Started with PL/SQL Table Functions class at the Oracle Dev Gym. Videos, tutorials and quizzes - then print a certificate when you are done! Last week, I published my first post in the Table Function series on pipelined table functions. I included this advice at the top of the post: Here's my first piece of advice regarding this interesting and in many ways unique (within PL/SQL) feature: You are unlikely to ever need a pipelined table function, but when you do, it is going to be  amazing . I bring this up right at the start because I have found over the years that many developers talk in the most glowing terms about pipelined table functions. Yet when I look at what they are doing with those functions, it becomes clear that they are not pumped up about the  pipelining . They are not, in fact,  benef...

August 2018 update: please do feel encourage to read this and my other posts on table functions, but you will learn much more about table functions by taking my Get Started with PL/SQL Table Functions class at the Oracle Dev Gym. Videos, tutorials and quizzes - then print a certificate when you are done! [Gee, that was embarrassing. I start a series on table functions , and then it falters and stops. My apologies; I got so busy eating and drinking and breathing and sleeping and....anyway, back to the series !] In this post I introduce PL/SQL developers to the  pipelined table function . Here's my first piece of advice regarding this interesting and in many ways unique (within PL/SQL) feature: You are unlikely to ever need a pipelined table function, but when you do, it is going to be amazing . I bring this up right at the start because I have found over the years that many developers talk in the most glowing terms about pipelined table functions. Yet when I look at what...