PL/SQL Beginners' Guide

PL/SQL is a procedural language designed specifically for the Oracle Database management system. It is a combination of SQL (Structured Query Language) and a procedural programming language, allowing developers to create scripts and programs that can manipulate and manage data stored in an Oracle database.

Here is an example of a simple PL/SQL block that retrieves data from a table called “employees” and prints the last names of all employees:

DECLARE
  cursor c1 is
    select last_name from employees;
  v_last_name employees.last_name%TYPE;
BEGIN
  open c1;
  loop
    fetch c1 into v_last_name;
    exit when c1%notfound;
    dbms_output.put_line(v_last_name);
  end loop;
  close c1;
END;

In this example, the cursor “c1” is defined to select the “last_name” column from the “employees” table. The variable “v_last_name” is defined as the same data type as the “last_name” column in the “employees” table. The cursor is then opened, and a loop is used to fetch each row from the cursor and print the value of the “last_name” column. The loop continues until all rows have been processed, and the cursor is then closed.

As for the dataset, you can load data into Oracle Database using SQL*Loader, external tables, and other ways.

Here is an example of loading data into the “employees” table using SQL*Loader: