Got error when creating stored procedure

Question

Hi,
I am a rookie in Oracle. I created a stored procedure:
create or replace procedure my_first_sp
as
begin
select cid from actions where rownum<3;
end;
And I got an error : "**** compilation error"
After I "show error" I got the description to see a "into" is expected.
But if I change the select statement to a insert statement, no error.
Please advice.
Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

When you have a standalone SELECT statement in PL/SQL, you have to have an INTO clause if you want the results to be stored in a local variable.
In your case, it would appear that you want your query to return multiple rows. In that case, you'd want to create a cursor, i.e.
CREATE OR REPLACE my_first_sp
AS
BEGIN
  FOR cursor_name IN (SELECT cid FROM actions WHERE rownum < 3)
  LOOP
    <<Do something>>
  END LOOP;
END;I would also tend to suspect that your SELECT statement is wrong. This statement will return an arbitrary two cid values from the actions table, which is not likely what you want.
Justin