How to spool the output of mod pl/sql ?

Question

I am trying to generate a HTML (will be static after I generate) web page from Oracle PL/SQL package. Moment I execute the package/procedure call, it should generate a HTML file and we will be publishing the file over the web.
create or replace procedure display_hello
IS
begin
htp.htmlOpen;
htp.print('Hello World');
htp.htmlClose;
end display_hello;
If I execute the above procedure using PL/SQL Developer, I am able to see the output in the neat HTML fashion. I would like to spool the HTML file used to display that and store it in a file so that i can publish it.
Any thoughts ?

Answer 1

vaibhav468 wrote:
Because we dont want to spoil the performance. Assume our data is not going to change frequently. Say its going to change only once in three days. I dont want people to query the data from the database each time when they open the page. I would like them to just use the static content which i have generated. But the moment the data in my tables are going to get changed, I would run a process and regenerate the page. Not a bad idea ?You can use page caching in mod_psql - have not used it myself, but recall discussions on comp.databases.oracle.server some years ago.
APEX also sports a cache feature - this is also worthwhile investigating.
What is a horrible idea though IMO, is to try and roll your own caching - but having PL/SQL code writing physical files to disk for the web server to serve up and at other times creating and streaming content dynamically from PL/SQL code.
You also need to ask yourself about the actual benefits you will get from caching - and whether that is worthwhile the saving in resources.
PL/SQL and SQL can be very fast.. with minimal overheads. And this is typically the code that you want to deploy for a web server (as web users expect fast response - a web page should be generated in around 2 secs). In which case it does not matter whether PL/SQL dynamically creates the web page or whether it is provided from a cache - where there is also the overheads of cache logic to consider.