Question

Good Day,

I have a PL-SQL query as follows. I’m trying to execute a query and store the results into a variable. So far I have this query which works:

    SELECT DECODE(COUNT(*), 0, 'N', 'Y') REC_EXISTS
    FROM
         (SELECT 
                COUNT(*) AS TOTAL_COUNT
           FROM DEV.BASEOBJECT INNER JOIN
                DEV.ANIMAL ON DEV.BASEOBJECT.ID = DEV.ANIMAL.BASEOBJECT_ID
       GROUP BY DEV.BASEOBJECT.ID, 
                DEV.BASEOBJECT.FIRST_NAME, 
                DEV.BASEOBJECT.LAST_NAME, 
                DEV.BASEOBJECT.CITY,
                DEV.BASEOBJECT.STATE,
                DEV.BASEOBJECT.ZIP,
                DEV.ANIMAL.ID,
                DEV.ANIMAL.NAME,
                DEV.ANIMAL.BREED, 
                DEV.ANIMAL.DATE_OF_BIRTH, 
                DEV.ANIMAL.GENDER,
                DEV.ANIMAL.SPECIES
         HAVING (COUNT(*) > 1));

But when I try to save the results into a variable with this query:

DECLARE
    v_name  VARCHAR2(2);
BEGIN
    SELECT DECODE(COUNT(*), 0, 'N', 'Y') REC_EXISTS
        INTO v_name
    FROM
         (SELECT 
                COUNT(*) AS TOTAL_COUNT
           FROM DEV.BASEOBJECT INNER JOIN
                DEV.ANIMAL ON DEV.BASEOBJECT.ID = DEV.ANIMAL.BASEOBJECT_ID
       GROUP BY DEV.BASEOBJECT.ID, 
                DEV.BASEOBJECT.FIRST_NAME, 
                DEV.BASEOBJECT.LAST_NAME, 
                DEV.BASEOBJECT.CITY,
                DEV.BASEOBJECT.STATE,
                DEV.BASEOBJECT.ZIP,
                DEV.ANIMAL.ID,
                DEV.ANIMAL.NAME,
                DEV.ANIMAL.BREED, 
                DEV.ANIMAL.DATE_OF_BIRTH, 
                DEV.ANIMAL.GENDER,
                DEV.ANIMAL.SPECIES
         HAVING (COUNT(*) > 1));
END

I get an error:

ERROR
ORA-06550: line 1, column 8:
PLS-00103: Encountered the symbol "" when expecting one of the following:

   begin function package pragma procedure subtype type use
   <an identifier> <a double-quoted delimited-identifier> form
   current cursor
The symbol "" was ignored.    

Eventually, this is going to be a stored procedure, but I don’t have that part ready yet, because I wanted to verify that what I have is working so far.

TIA,

coson

Answer 1

How are you running this? What tools are you using? I think that the problem is your tool/IDE is trying to compile this as a function/procedure. This code looks ok and would probably run with no problems if you ran it as a script in SQL*Plus. If you run this as a script, you should add a dbmbs_output.put_line(v_name) after the query to see the result.