How to use watch the control flow in the funation using dbms.output_line?

Question

Hi All,
I have written a function which is working fine.
But i want to see the control and data flow in the function.
I want to see particular variable in the flow.
How can i do that?
Thanks in Advance,
Vinay

Answer 1

user12281717 wrote:
I want to see particular variable in the flow.
How can i do that?The question is where/when/how you want to see it. PL/SQL is a server-side language. A PL/SQL process runs entirely inside an Oracle server process.
That server process does not have a display terminal or a STDOUT device that you can view interactively for output of the process while it is running.
One option, and a common one, is to use DBMS_OUTPUT. This writes to a static PL/SQL session buffer (variable). When the process complete, the client (TOAD/SQL-Developer/SQL*Plus/Java/etc) can interrogate this buffer and display the contents of that to the end-user/developer.
But this is not interactive..
If you want to see interactively what is happening, there are couple of methods. You can run a client session that acts as a database pipe server. It reads data from a pipe and immediately displays it. In your PL/SQL process you then write to this pipe - where the other client process, running the pipe server, can immediately read and display it. See DBMS_PIPE for details.
You can use the same approach using a log file. Again, the PL/SQL process writes to a log file and you, using a client command like Unix/Linux tail, displays the latest additions to the file. See UTL_FILE for details.
If you are merely interested at what processing step a PL/SQL process is at, you can record that data in the action and module columns of your session (visible via the v$session and v$sqlarea views). See DBMS_APPLICATION_INFO for details.
You can create a procedure that inserts a log entry into a log table, using an autonomous transaction. This means that when your PL/SQL code calls this procedure to log something, that log data is immediately committed in its own transaction and visible to other clients.
There are other options too like advance message queues, or creating long operation entries, and so on. Which one to use depends entirely on your requirements.
The details of the above interface packages are available in the [Oracle® Database PL/SQL Packages and Types Reference|http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/appdev.102/b14258/toc.htm] guide.