Every 4 months or so I need a simple way to split a string (VARCHAR2) into elements, where the elements are separated with some fixed value (a comma, a colon, or perhaps a longer string). Since my short-term memory is too short0, I figured I should make a reminder here. Of course, you’ll find this on Stackoverflow as well.

If you need to delete all rows in a table that has parent keys for other tables' foreign keys, and the foreign keys constraints have not been defined with “on delete cascade”, you can do a recursive delete with the following simple procedure.

Here the other day I came across this package in a PL/SQL procedure written by someone else. From the name I reckoned it was a standard package from Oracle, but I had never seen it before. It is not mentioned in the manual Database PL/SQL Packages and Types Reference, and I could not find much about it at My Oracle Support either. Anyway, with SQL Developer you’ll get what you need by hitting Shift-F4 (with the cursor at the name of the package). The API is pretty good documented in the…

A simple implementation of Collatz conjecture in PL/SQL: