The more I hesitate about a thing the more it proves to be useful for me. This is the philosophy that I have developed about myself over the years. Although in professional life you should not hesitate in doing something and I try my best to follow this approach. But there is a thing about how you conceive a thing. From the start I always hesitated to work with Oracle. But when I did it, then it was more then just a work. It was an experience of lifetime. Going through Oracle I always found it difficult to conceive PL/SQL. I must say that I under estimated it until and unless I started some real series application development. Well I must point out here that I am not good in development. I am just starting with it. I always did DBA tasks more then development tasks and feel more confident in doing them. But I have started thinking about it seriously.
One of the reasons is PL/SQL. I started liking PL/SQL when I heard and read about its features in different articles and blogs. The other motivation was that Oracle continues to empower it as a full fledge programming language rather then just an extension to SQL. Now one may wonder that what is the origin of PL/SQL and why the word SQL is included in naming it. While I will talk about the history of PL/SQL in a separate post, here is why this language was introduced at all.
Oracle is an object relational database management system, the first ever RDBMS in history. Like any other RDBMS the primary interface to the Oracle database is through SQL. And believe me you can retrieve almost all kind of data stored in a database through SQL. But despite all the enhancements of Oracle in ANSI SQL, the fact remains is that SQL is still a data retrieval mechanism rather then a programming language. It still lacks the features of a programming language like looping through records processing one at a time, encrypting data for security, storing code on server rather then on client side and unable to handle arrays, collections and other similar data types. So this was the primary motive behind PL/SQL. To enable the developer to use programming language features with tight integration of database. And believe me; I am saying it after thinking for a moment that PL/SQL has become a very powerful programming language for applications that use Oracle as back end database.
