ABSTRACT
New built-in packages magically appear in each new “dot” release of the Oracle database. The power behind these packages often amazes me. For example, several versions ago, DBMS_JOBS, a cron-like (UNIX background process scheduler) package; DBMS_PIPES, a message-queuing package; and UTL_FILE, a text file reader-writer, were added to the built-in database packages. Each of these brought a new level of powerful features to users’ programming fingertips.
