dbms_pipe

I posted a message on twitter saying that DBMS_PIPE is an excellent mechanism to make a session run and halt in PLSQL. One response I gotten was asking for an example of that. That is what this post is about.

DBMS_PIPE is an implementation of a pipe inside the Oracle database. A pipe is a mechanism that is not limited to the Oracle database, in fact I assume the implementation is inspired by an operating system level pipe, which can be created using the ‘mknod /path/pipename p’ on unix and unix-like systems. A quick search shows windows has got them too, but not really, or does it? Another implementation is the pipe to redirect output from one command to the next using ‘|’. The essence of a pipe that input to and output from the pipe are separated from each other, and that information is flowing from the inputting process of the pipe to the outputting process.