Call PL/SQL Procedure (not stored) from SQLPLUS

Question

Hello,
the following code creates a stored procedure and allows to call the procedure from SQLPLUS using EXEC.
CREATE or REPLACE PROCEDURE welcome IS
BEGIN
    dbms_output.put_line('Welcome user ' || user);
END;
exec welcome;I would like to do the same without storing the procedure. The procedure should be defined in an PL/SQL-Script and called in a SQLPLUS loop. On the one hand I do not have the privileges to create stored procdures. On the other hand I want to use put_line in the loop. Without passing control to SQLPLUS (e.g. the loop-master) all output is kept in the buffer and no information are shown during processing the data.
Regards, Rainer

Answer 1

netaktiv wrote:
There should be a repair job updating many hundredthousends records. A script should be created and called only once and the calling user should be informed about the processing status. There is no need for heavy output, but after 5000 or 10000 records I would like to display a message saying nnnnn records processed.Then you need another mechanism to report the current status to the user.
You cannot use the current session to do that. Sessions are serialised. That means they can do only service a single request at a time. So if the session executes procedure foo that updates 100's of 1000's of rows - then that is what the process will be doing. The procedure can only report back to the client after it has completed. It cannot interact directly with the client during the executing of that procedure.
This means that if you want to actually send a notification to the client, you need to do that via a separate session. E.g. the 1st session executes procedure foo that performs the update. That procedure sends a notification (using DBMS_ALERT or DBMS_PIPE for example) to the 2nd session - where the 2nd session receives the asynchronous notification and reports that to the user.
Another method would be for the update procedure to register a long operation using DBMS_APPLICATION_INFO. This enables another session to view the status and progress of the update procedure via virtual (v$) performance views.
Another method would be for the client session not to start the update procedure itself. Instead it can schedule a background job (using DBMS_JPB or DBMS_SCHEDULER interfaces) - and then monitor the status of the job.
Also suggest that you spend some time familiarising yourself with application developer fundamentals and concepts for Oracle. There are guides for both at http://tahiti.orcacle.com for the Oracle version you use. You cannot correctly use Oracle if you do not understand how Oracle works and what the application development features are. And your current approach using DBMS_OUTPUT is pretty much flawed and not how Oracle sessions should report their processing status to a client.