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Asked: 2026-05-23T22:56:15+00:00

I not family with PL/SQL. Can anyone explain why I can’t do the following?

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I not family with PL/SQL. Can anyone explain why I can’t do the following?

BEGIN
  IF TRUE THEN
    CREATE INDEX TestIndex ON SomeTable (SomeColumn);
  END IF;
END;

I would get the following error:

Error report:
ORA-06550: line 3, column 5:
PLS-00103: Encountered the symbol “CREATE” when expecting one of the following:
begin case declare exit for goto if loop mod null pragma
raise return select update while with
<<
close current delete fetch lock insert open rollback
savepoint set sql execute commit forall merge pipe
06550. 00000 – “line %s, column %s:\n%s”
*Cause: Usually a PL/SQL compilation error.
*Action:

The only way I can by pass this error is do dynamic sql:

BEGIN
  IF TRUE THEN
    EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'CREATE INDEX TestIndex ON SomeTable (SomeColumn)';
  END IF;
END;
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Oracle doesn’t allow DDL in a PL/SQL block as static SQL so you’ve identified the only workaround (well, technically, you could use DBMS_SQL rather than EXECUTE IMMEDIATE but you’d still be dealing with dynamic SQL).

    I don’t know that there is any technical reason that they couldn’t allow DDL in static SQL. But since 99% of the time you shouldn’t be doing DDL in a stored procedure– creating objects is something that would almost exclusively be done when you’re doing a deployment rather than at runtime– forcing people to use dynamic SQL makes developers pause to consider whether they’re really in that 1% of cases where such a thing makes sense.

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