Oracle9i Application Developer's Guide - Large Objects (LOBs) Release 1 (9.0.1) Part Number A88879-01 |
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Modeling and Design, 17 of 21
In PL/SQL, a number of semantic changes have been made as described in the previous paragraphs.
The new PL/SQL semantics support is described in the following sections as follows:
The implicit conversion in both directions, from CLOB to VARCHAR2, and from VARCHAR2 to CLOB, have made the following operations between CLOBs and VARCHAR2s possible:
The following example illustrates the way CLOB data was accessed prior to this release. This application tries to simply display both the Gist and Story from the table Multimedia_tab.
declare myStoryLOB CLOB; myStoryBuf VARCHAR2(4001); amt NUMBER:=4001; offset NUMBER := 1; begin SELECT Story INTO myStoryLOB FROM Multimedia_tab WHERE Clip_ID = 10; DBMS_LOB.READ(myStoryLOB, amt, offset, myStoryBuf); -- Display Gist and Story by printing 'myStoryBuf'. end;
The following example illustrates the way CLOB data is accessed with this release when the CLOBs are treated as VARCHAR2s:
declare myStoryBuf VARCHAR2(4001); begin SELECT Story INTO myStoryBuf FROM Multimedia_tab WHERE Clip_ID = 10; -- Display Story by printing myStoryBuf directly end;
declaremyGistLOB CLOB;beginSELECT Gist INTO myGistLOB FROM Multimedia_tab WHERE Clip_ID = 10; -- myGistLOB is a temporary LOB. -- Use myGistLOB as a lob locatorend;
In SQL and PL/SQL, the following new explicit conversion functions have been added to convert other data types to CLOB, NCLOB, and BLOB as part of the LONG-to-LOB migration:
Other explicit conversion functions are not supported in this release, such as, TO_NUMBER(), see Table 7-6. Conversion function details are explained in Chapter 8, "Migrating From LONGs to LOBs".
CLOB and VARCHAR2 are still two distinct types. But depending on the usage, a CLOB can be passed to SQL and PL/SQL VARCHAR2 built-in functions, behaving exactly like a VARCHAR2. Or the variable can be passed into DBMS_LOB APIs, acting like a LOB locator. Please see the following combined example,"PL/SQL Example 4: CLOB Variables in PL/SQL".
PL/SQL VARCHAR2 functions/operators need to take CLOBs as argument or operands.
When the size of a VARCHAR2 variable is not large enough to contain the result from a function that returns a CLOB, or a SELECT on a CLOB column, an error should be raised and no operation will be performed. This is consistent with current VARCHAR2 behavior.
1 declare 2 myStory CLOB; 3 revisedStory CLOB; 4 myGist VARCHAR2(100); 5 revisedGist VARCHAR2(100); 6 begin 7 -- select a CLOB column into a CLOB variable 8 SELECT Story INTO myStory FROM Multimedia_tab WHERE clip_id=10; 9 -- perform VARCHAR2 operations on a CLOB variable 10 revisedStory := UPPER(SUBSTR(myStory, 100, 1)); 11 -- revisedStory is a temporary LOB 12 -- Concat a VARCHAR2 at the end of a CLOB 13 revisedStory := revisedStory || myGist; 14 -- The following statement will raise an error since myStory is 15 -- longer than 100 bytes 16 myGist := myStory; 17 end;
Please note that in line 10 of "PL/SQL Example 4: CLOB Variables in PL/SQL", a temporary CLOB is implicitly created and is pointed to by the revisedStory CLOB locator. In the current interface the line can be expanded as:
buffer VARCHAR2(32000) DBMS_LOB.CREATETEMPORARY(revisedStory); buffer := UPPER(DBMS_LOB.SUBSTR(myStory,100,1)); DBMS_LOB.WRITE(revisedStory,length(buffer),1, buffer);
In line 13, myGist is appended to the end of the temporary LOB, which has the same effect of:
DBMS_LOB.WRITEAPPEND(revisedStory, myGist, length(myGist));
In some occasions, implicitly created temporary LOBs in PL/SQL statements can change the representation of LOB locators previously defined. Consider the next example.
1 declare 2 myStory CLOB; 3 amt number:=100; 4 buffer VARCHAR2(100):='some data'; 5 begin 6 -- select a CLOB column into a CLOB variable 7 S ELECT Story INTO myStory FROM Multimedia_tab WHERE clip_id=10; 8 DBMS_LOB.WRITE(myStory, amt, 1, buf); 9 -- write to the persistent LOB in the table 10 11 myStory:= UPPER(SUBSTR(myStory, 100, 1)); 12 -- perform VARCHAR2 operations on a CLOB variable, temporary LOB created. Changes 13 -- will not be reflected in the database table from this point on. 14 15 update Multimedia_tab set Story = myStory WHERE clip_id = 10; 16 -- an update is necessary to synchronize the data in the table. 17 end;
After line 7, myStory represents a persistent LOB in Multimedia_tab.
The DBMS_LOB.WRITE()
call in line 8 directly writes the data to the table.
No UPDATE statement is necessary. Subsequently in line 11, a temporary LOB is created and assigned to myStory because myStory should now behave like a local VARCHAR2 variable. The LOB locator myStory now points to the newly-created temporary LOB.
Therefore, modifications to myStory will no longer be reflected in the database. To propagate the changes to the database table, an UPDATE statement becomes necessary now. Note again that for the previous persistent LOB, the UPDATE is not required.
Temporary LOBs created in a program block as a result of a SELECT or an assignment are freed automatically at the end of the PL/SQL block/function/procedure. You can choose to free the temporary LOBs to reclaim system resources and temporary tablespace by calling DBMS_LOB.FREETEMPORARY()
on the CLOB variable.
declare Story1 CLOB; Story2 CLOB; StoryCombined CLOB; StoryLower CLOB; begin SELECT Story INTO Story1 FROM Multimedia_tab WHERE Clip_ID = 1; SELECT Story INTO Story2 FROM Multimedia_tab WHERE Clip_ID = 2; StoryCombined := Story1 || Story2; -- StoryCombined is a temporary LOB -- Free the StoryCombined manually to free up space taken DBMS_LOB.FREETEMPORARY(StoryCombined); StoryLower := LOWER(Story1) || LOWER(Story2); end; -- At the end of block, StoryLower is freed.
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