How to return multiple rows from the stored procedure? (Oracle PL/SQL)

Question

I want to create a stored procedure with one argument which will return different sets of records depending on the argument. What is the way to do this? Can I call it from p

Answer 1

You may use Oracle pipelined functions

Basically, when you would like a PLSQL (or java or c) routine to be the «source» of data -- instead of a table -- you would use a pipelined function.

Simple Example - Generating Some Random Data
How could you create N unique random numbers depending on the input argument?

create type array
as table of number;


create function  gen_numbers(n in number default null)
return array
PIPELINED
as
begin
  for i in 1 .. nvl(n,999999999)
  loop
     pipe row(i);
 end loop;
 return;
end;

Suppose we needed three rows for something. We can now do that in one of two ways:

select * from TABLE(gen_numbers(3));

COLUMN_VALUE

---

       1
       2
       3

or

select * from TABLE(gen_numbers)
 where rownum <= 3;

COLUMN_VALUE

---

       1
       2
       3

pipelied Functions1 pipelied Functions2