Are cursors necessary for queries in a procedure? - oracle

Question

I'm rather new to Oracle and I was asked to write a procedure to query some data from a table. I built it with 2 arguments, a cursor and a number. Essentially I have:
PROCEDURE PROC_NAME (
cursor_name IN OUT NOCOPY MY_DEFINED_CURSOR_TYPE,
a_number IN NUMBER);
AS
BEGIN
OPEN CURSOR_NAME FOR
SELECT
column
FROM
table
WHERE
table.dat_value > (SYSDATE - a_number);
END PROC_NAME;
It works like a charm, and I'm able to fetch the column from the cursor. My problem is that the requester doesn't want to pass in a cursor, they just want to pass in the number. I've never created a procedure that doesn't use a cursor to return the values of a query and the examples I have seen only ever do it that way. Is this possible?

Answer 1

You can use a collection:
CREATE PROCEDURE PROC_NAME (
a_number IN NUMBER,
numbers OUT SYS.ODCINUMBERLIST
)
AS
BEGIN
SELECT number_value
BULK COLLECT INTO numbers
FROM table_name
WHERE date_value > (SYSDATE - a_number);
END PROC_NAME;
Also, if you don't want to pass in a cursor then you can just pass one out:
CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE PROC_NAME (
a_number IN NUMBER,
numbers OUT SYS_REFCURSOR
)
AS
BEGIN
OPEN numbers FOR
SELECT number_value
FROM table_name
WHERE date_value > (SYSDATE - a_number);
END PROC_NAME;

Answer 2

Use a function instead ? But it's just a "stylistic" difference compared to procedure out parameter. Anyway the returned value have to be implicitly passed (unlike in SQL Server as noted by #ShannonSeverance).
function f(
p_days in number
) return my_defined_cursor_type is
v_cur my_defined_cursor_type;
begin
open v_cur for
select
column
from
table
where
table.dat_value > (sysdate - p_days);
return v_cur;
end;
/
Usage
declare
v_cur my_defined_cursor_type := f(42);
begin
-- use v_cur as you like
end;

Answer 3

If you want to apply some PL/SQL logic, but remain using select for querying the data (i.e not pass in a cursor - use pipelined functions.
You need to define the TYPEs of the result row and table; FETCH the cursor and PIPE the results in the function.
CREATE or replace type MY_DEFINED_ROW_TYPE as object
(
txt VARCHAR2(30)
);
/
create or replace type MY_DEFINED_TABLE_TYPE as table of MY_DEFINED_ROW_TYPE
/
create or replace function FUN_NAME( a_number IN NUMBER) return
MY_DEFINED_TABLE_TYPE
PIPELINED
as
cur MY_DEFINED_CURSOR_TYPE;
v_txt varchar2(30);
begin
OPEN cur
FOR
SELECT
column
FROM table
WHERE table.dat_value > (SYSDATE - a_number);
LOOP
FETCH cur INTO v_txt;
EXIT WHEN cur%NOTFOUND;
pipe row(v_txt);
END LOOP;
return;
end;
/
The usage:
select * from table (FUN_NAME(2));