Create or Replace Procedure Tips

Oracle CREATE OR REPLACE procedure

A procedure is created using the Oracle create or replace procedure syntax below:

create or replace procedure <Name>
  (<variable list>)
as (or is)

  local variable declaration
begin
    code section
  exceptions
end;

With Oracle CREATE OR REPLACE, the OR REPLACE clause allows the compiler to replace a procedure if a procedure of the same name is already in the database schema.  This aspect of the Oracle CREATE OR REPLACE procedure is handy during development as you do not have to drop the procedure each time before recreating it.

With the Oracle CREATE OR REPLACE procedure the procedure can be called any valid object name.  As with any database object, the Oracle CREATE OR REPLACE procedure is created in the user's schema unless a schema name is provided.  The example below creates the Oracle procedure in the PUBS schema.  The user of the CREATE OR REPLACE procedure must have rights granted to create objects in another schema.

create or replace procedure pubs.example_defaults

Oracle 10g Changes to REPLACE:

In Oracle Database 10g, the REPLACE function has been extended with the regexp_replace function.

regexp_replace extends the functionality of the REPLACE function by letting you search a string for a regular expression pattern. By default, the function returns the supplied source_string variable with every occurrence of the regular expression pattern replaced by the supplied replace_string variable. The string returned is either VARCHAR2 or CLOB, and in the same character set as the source_string supplied.

Let's look at an example of regexp_replace (note: in this example we added a column to the emp table to allow for emp_phone):

SQL> SELECT
   2 REGEXP_REPLACE(emp_phone,
   3 '([[:digit:]]{3})\.([[:digit:]]{3})\.([[:digit:]]{4})',
   4 '(\1) \2-\3') "Test"
   5 FROM emp;

            Test
----------------
  (404) 444-4321
  (404) 555-5432
  (404) 666-6543

In this eample we search for a pattern of numbers that looks like a European phone number listing such as 111.222.3333 and convert it to a normal USA format listing of (111) 222-3333.

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