Short for
Procedural Language/SQL,
Oracle’s procedural extension to the industry-standard
SQL. By adding
procedural constructs to SQL, such as
encapsulation, function overloading,
information hiding,
block structure,
conditional statements,
loop statements,
variable types, structured data and customized error handling, the PL/SQL language takes on characteristics of
object-oriented programming languages. PL/SQL's language
syntax, structure and
data types are similar to that of the
Ada programming language. Integrated with a
database server, PL/SQL does not exist as a standalone language. It typically is used to write data-centric programs to manipulate data in an Oracle database.
