Question

CREATE  OR  REPLACE  PROCEDURE GetEmployeesInDept( c OUT  SYS_REFCURSOR)

I am having a query related to the above Stored Procedures,
That is while defining the cursor we mentioned it as sys_refcursor, and in some, web site I have seen it as REF CURSOR as shown

create or replace procedure GetEmployeesInDept( c out ref cursor)

Please tell me what is the difference between the ref cursor and sys_refcursor.

Answer 1

I’m not sure what you mean by

create or replace procedure GetEmployeesInDept( c out ref cursor)

I’ve not seen this before and I can’t get a procedure declared like this to compile. Could you please provide sample code or links to where you’ve seen this before?

What you might have seen is something like the following:

CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE demo AS

  TYPE ref_cursor IS REF CURSOR;

  PROCEDURE GetEmployeesInDept(c OUT ref_cursor);

END demo;
/

CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE BODY demo AS

  PROCEDURE GetEmployeesInDept(c OUT ref_cursor)
  IS
  BEGIN
    RAISE NO_DATA_FOUND;
  END GetEmployeesInDept;

END demo;
/

In this case, we declare a type to be a REF CURSOR, and use it as an OUT parameter in a stored procedure.

There is no difference between using a type declared as REF CURSOR and using SYS_REFCURSOR, because SYS_REFCURSOR is defined in the STANDARD package as a REF CURSOR in the same way that we declared the type ref_cursor. In fact, if you’re using Oracle 9i or later, look within your Oracle database installation, in %ORACLE_HOME%\rdbms\admin\stdspec.sql, and you should find the following line somewhere in there:

type sys_refcursor is ref cursor;

SYS_REFCURSOR was introduced in Oracle 9i. You may find various types declared as REF CURSOR in PL/SQL code that was written before Oracle 9i was released.