DDL statement/s in stored procedures (FUNCTION)

Question

Hello all,
I was trying to create a small function that tests keywords on the basis of successful/failed table creation. If a table can be created with a keyword as identifier, it is a non-reserved keyword, if table creation fails, it is a reserved keyword:
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION createTableForKeyword (keyword VARCHAR) RETURN BOOLEAN IS
BEGIN
CREATE TABLE keyword (x NUMBER);
-- if no exception occurred, table creation succeeded
DROP TABLE keyword; drop it
RETURN FALSE; -- FALSE means non-reserved
EXCEPTION
WHEN OTHERS THEN
-- if exception occurred, table creation failed
RETURN TRUE; -- TRUE means reserved
END createTableForKeyword;
This would have been my first PL/SQL program, but I get the following error:
PLS-00103: Found symbol "CREATE" when expecting one of:
begin case declare exit ................
.............. merge pipe
I had to translate the error message from German, but it should suffice. Obviously DDL statements in functions are not allowed. How do I solve my problem then, given a table that has one column containing the keyword?:
CREATE TABLE Keywords (keyword VARCHAR(30));
I was looking too call this function from a loop, but how would I do this without a function? How do I capture table creation fails without exceptions in functions?
TIA
Karsten

Answer 1

To run DDL inside stored procedure you must use Dynamic SQL. Use EXECUTE IMMEDIATE
To see if a word is a reserved word just query V$RESERVED_WORDS
Thanks,
Karthick.