It is sometimes required to get the result of a stored procedure in a variable which can be used later or to output the result.

To do so, we can use the "OUT" parameter mode while defining stored procedures.

In the below section, we will be writing a stored procedure to get the square root of a number returned in an output variable provided by us.



Stored Procedure Definition:

Store the below stored procedure in a file named my_sqrt.sql and save it.

DELIMITER $$

DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS my_sqrt$$

CREATE PROCEDURE my_sqrt(inp_number INT, OUT op_number FLOAT)
BEGIN
    SET op_number=SQRT(inp_number);
…

Yesterday I was discussing with a fellow DBA about ways to check the status of existing and/or past RMAN jobs. Good backup scripts usually write their output to some sort of log file so, checking the output is usually a straight-forward task. However, backup jobs can be scheduled in many different ways (crontab, Grid Control, Scheduled Tasks, etc) and finding the log file may be tricky if you don’t know the environment well.
Furthermore, log files may also have already been overwritten by the next backup or simply just deleted. An alternative way of accessing that information, thus, may come handy.

Fortunately, RMAN keeps the backup metadata around for some time and it can be accessed through the database’s V$ views. Obviously, if you need this information because your database just crashed and needs to be restored, the method described here is useless.

Backup jobs’ status and metadata

A lot of metadata about …