About Oracle Wrap Utility

These utilities can load, encrypt, tune or debug code objects. This chapter will focus on the utilities that perform these functions, including wrap, dbms_profiler, dbms_debug, loadjava, dropjava and loadpsp.

The first of these utilities to be discussed will be the wrap utility that allows PL/SQL developers to encrypt their code.

PL/SQL Wrap Utility for Encryption

The wrap utility (wrap.exe) provides a way for PL/SQL developers to protect their intellectual property by making their PL/SQL code unreadable. These encryption options have long been available for other programming languages and were introduced for PL/SQL in version 7. It still amazes me at the number of proprietary procedures and packages that are installed in a readable format – plain PL/SQL.

Unfortunately there is no such command as:

ALTER PACKAGE BODY [name] WRAP;

Instead, the wrap utility takes a readable, ASCII text file as input and converts it to a file containing byte code. The result is that the DBA, developers or anyone with database access cannot view the source code in any readable format.

The command line options for wrap are:

wrap iname=[file] oname=[file]

Wrap only for production - Wrapping code is desired for production environments but not for profiling. It is much easier to see the unencrypted form of the text in our reports than it is to connect line numbers to source versions. Use dbms_profiler before you wrap your code in a test environment, wrap it, and then put it in production.

One word of caution here – wrap is an one-way encryption process for the files; there is no un-wrap function. So never throw away your original file. The wrap is done to make sure that someone peeking into the dba_source view will not be able to see the code in clear text.