Oracle equivalent of a variable in MS SQL Server

Question

Hi,
I need the equivalent sql statement in oracle... Sounds real simple, but I cant seem to the the Oracle syntax
(MS SQL syntax)
declare @id integer
set @id = (select min(tranid) from tbltransaction)
select * from tbltransaction where tranid = @id
Above is a real simple example of what I want to do... I need to get a date, then use that date in a second query
The real query needs to get a date first, then execute a query based on that date. When I tried using a subquery that gets the date; it causes the job to run over an hour....
Currently I manually get the date (under 10 seconds) then enter the date into the query and run it (about 20 minutes)

Answer 1

here is how you do in Oracle PL/SQL :
declare
my_date date;
my_col my_tbl.col1%type;
begin
select date_col into my_date
from date_tbl where <where clause>;
select col1 into my_col
from my_tbl where date_col = my_date;
exception
<handle exceptions>
end;
There is one thing to note in PL/SQL, if your select query returns more than one row then either you've to use a collection variable or use a cursor.