Not quite an invalid function
An interesting thing happened today, as I was explaining how you call functions with embedded DML statements. The students were stunned at seeing an ORA-06576
error for a function that they knew existed. It’s one of those imperfect error messages …
Basically, they wrote a wrapper function to a parallel enabled function, and then they tried to call it into a session level bind variable, like this:
SQL> VARIABLE verified NUMBER SQL> CALL update_contact INTO :verified; |
It failed with the following message:
CALL update_contact INTO :verified * ERROR at line 1: ORA-06576: NOT a valid FUNCTION OR PROCEDURE name |
They were stunned but I was mum. I suggested that they test the call in an anonymous block program. Here’s the PL/SQL call example:
SQL> SET SERVEROUTPUT ON SIZE 1000000 SQL> BEGIN 2 IF update_contact = 1 THEN 3 DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line('Success!'); 4 ELSE 5 DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line('Failure!'); 6 END IF; 7 END; 8 / |
It returns
Success! |
I removed the puzzled look by explaining that while you don’t need to provide the open and close parentheses inside PL/SQL, you do generally require them in the context of a CALL
statement. They’re not required for stored functions in SQL statements, but they’re required for stored instantiable object types.
Here’s the correct way call the program:
SQL> CALL update_contact() INTO :verified; SQL> SELECT DECODE(:verified,1,'Success!','Failure!') AS answer FROM dual; |
It prints this to console:
ANSWER
--------
Success! |
The natural question is why don’t you just run the function as part of a query. It’s a great question because it lets me demonstrate another principle. The principle that you can’t can’t perform a DML in a query, which is abstract until you see it up front and personal.
SQL> SELECT update_contact() FROM dual; |
this query raises the following exception:
SELECT update_contact() FROM dual * ERROR at line 1: ORA-14551: cannot perform a DML operation inside a query ORA-06512: at "PLSQL.UPDATE_CONTACT", line 4 |
Setup Code Supplement
You can find the base code for this example here. It comes from the Oracle Database 11g PL/SQL Programming book. After you run the create_store.sql
script, you’ll need to run the following:
-- Add a null allowed column for derived data. ALTER TABLE contact ADD (full_name VARCHAR2(44)); -- Define a function concatenate strings. CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION MERGE ( last_name VARCHAR2 , first_name VARCHAR2 , middle_initial VARCHAR2 ) RETURN VARCHAR2 PARALLEL_ENABLE IS BEGIN RETURN last_name ||', '||first_name||' '||middle_initial; END; / -- Define a wrapper function around the merge function. CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION update_contact RETURN NUMBER IS ret_val NUMBER := 0; -- The default return value to false or zero. BEGIN UPDATE contact c1 SET c1.full_name = (SELECT MERGE(c2.last_name ,c2.first_name ,c2.middle_initial) FROM contact c2 WHERE c1.rowid = c2.rowid); IF SQL%ROWCOUNT > 0 THEN ret_val := 1; -- This is only reached when 1 or more rows are updated. END IF; RETURN ret_val; END update_contact; / |