Best practice: bulk update (inverse of REF CURSOR SELECT)??

Question

To move data from the database to the application, there are REF CURSORS. However, there is no easy way to move updates/inserts from a dataset back to the database.
Could someone provide some guidelines or simple examples of how to do bulk updates (and I'm talking multiple columns for multiple rows).
I guess the way to go is arraybind. Are there any guidelines on how to handle them in .Net and PL/SQL ?

Answer 1

You don't use the DECLARE keyword when defining stored procedures. The IS/ AS keyword is what you use instead.
CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE TEST_REF
IS
  TYPE REF_EMP IS REF CURSOR RETURN EMPLOYEES%ROWTYPE;
  RF_EMP REF_EMP;
  V_EMP EMPLOYEES%ROWTYPE;
BEGIN
  DBMS_OUTPUT.ENABLE(1000000);
  OPEN RF_EMP FOR
    SELECT *
      FROM EMPLOYEES
     WHERE EMPLOYEE_ID > 100;
  FETCH RF_EMP INTO V_EMP;
  DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(V_EMP.FIRST_NAME || ' ' || V_EMP.LAST_NAME);
  CLOSE RF_EMP;
EXCEPTION
  WHEN OTHERS
    THEN DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(SQLERRM);
END TEST_REF;will compile. It seems a bit odd that you are opening a cursor and only fetching the first row from it. I would tend to suspect that you want to loop over every row that is returned.
Justin