Java functions with Oracle 10g

Question

I have browsed through other related message threads on this forum and it seems that the general recommendation is to develop stored procedures and functions using PL/SQL.
I need to implement a set of functions that perform date related processing and are self contained (no SQL code or calls). For this I could reuse some Java methods that I have successfully used in an Apache Derby database. In this situation what is your experience related to performance of Java functions compared to PL/SQL? Does the effort of rewriting this code in PL/SQL make sense?

Answer 1

I made some changes on the class posted by to solve the encoding problems with CLOBs.
So here is the result of my job.
import java.sql.SQLException;
import oracle.sql.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.zip.InflaterInputStream;
import java.util.zip.DeflaterOutputStream;
* A simple class for LOB compression and decompression in Oracle Database.
* Will work in 8i and better.  Use utl_compress from 10g onward.
public class CompressionUtility {
     private static void pipeStreams( InputStream inStream, OutputStream outStream, int bufferSize) throws IOException {
          //System.out.println("PIPE -");
          byte[] buffer=new byte[bufferSize];
          int cnt;
          while ((cnt=inStream.read(buffer))!=-1) {
               outStream.write(buffer,0,cnt);
     private static void pipeStreams( Reader inStream, Writer outStream) throws IOException {
          //System.out.println("PIPE Reader-Writer");
          int val = 0;
          while ( (val = inStream.read()) != -1 ) {
               outStream.write(val);
     private static void pipeStreams( Reader inStream, OutputStream outStream) throws IOException {
          //System.out.println("PIPE Reader-");
          int val = 0;
          while ( (val = inStream.read()) != -1 ) {
               outStream.write(val);
    private static void pipeStreams( InputStream inStream, Writer outStream) throws IOException {
          System.out.println("PIPE -Writer");
          int val = 0;
          while ( (val=inStream.read()) != -1 ) {
               outStream.write(val);
* Compresses the CLOB into BLOB
* @param clob the source CLOB (plain text)
* @param blob the target BLOB (will hold compressed binary data) it should be
* an empty BLOB retrieved for example with dbms_lob.createtemporary(l_blob,true);
* @throws Exception mostly I/O exception if ever
     public static void compress(CLOB clob, BLOB blob) throws IOException, SQLException {
          //System.out.println("Compressione C->B");
          Reader in=clob.getCharacterStream();
          Writer z=new OutputStreamWriter(new DeflaterOutputStream(blob.getBinaryOutputStream()));
          DeflaterOutputStream z = new DeflaterOutputStream(blob.getBinaryOutputStream());
          int val = 0;
          while ( (val=in.read()) != -1 ) {
               z.write(val);
          pipeStreams(in, z);
          in.close();
          z.close();
* Decompresses the BLOB into CLOB
* @param blob the source BLOB (compressed binary data)
* @param clob the target CLOB (will hold plain text) it should be an empty CLOB
* retrieved for example with dbms_lob.createtemporary(l_clob,true);
* @throws Exception mostly I/O exception if ever
    public static void decompress(BLOB blob, CLOB clob)
      throws IOException, SQLException {
           //System.out.println("Decompressione B->C");
        Writer out=clob.getCharacterOutputStream();
        Reader z=new InputStreamReader(new InflaterInputStream(blob.getBinaryStream()));
          InflaterInputStream z = new InflaterInputStream(blob.getBinaryStream());
        int val = 0;
          while ( (val=z.read()) != -1 ) {
               out.write(val);
        pipeStreams(z, out);
        z.close();
        out.close();
* Compresses the BLOB into BLOB
* @param slob the source BLOB (plain binary data)
* @param blob the target BLOB (will hold compressed binary data) it should be
* an empty BLOB retrieved for example with dbms_lob.createtemporary(l_blob,true);
* @throws Exception mostly I/O exception if ever
    public static void compress(BLOB slob, BLOB blob)
      throws IOException, SQLException {
           //System.out.println("Compressione B->B");
        InputStream in=slob.getBinaryStream();
        DeflaterOutputStream z=new DeflaterOutputStream(blob.getBinaryOutputStream());
        pipeStreams(in, z, blob.getBufferSize());
        in.close();
        z.close();
* Decompresses the BLOB into CLOB
* @param blob the source BLOB (compressed binary data)
* @param slob the target CLOB (will hold plain binary data) it should be an
* empty CLOB retrieved for example with dbms_lob.createtemporary(l_blob,true);
* @throws Exception mostly I/O exception if ever
    public static void decompress(BLOB blob, BLOB slob)
      throws IOException, SQLException {
           //System.out.println("Decompressione B->B");
        OutputStream out=slob.getBinaryOutputStream();
        InflaterInputStream z=new InflaterInputStream(blob.getBinaryStream());
        pipeStreams(z, out, blob.getBufferSize());
        z.close();
        out.close();
}The main problem was with the getAsciiStream() function that has to be replaced by getCharacterStream().