SQL Functions

The PL/SQL uses all the SQL functions involving the following aggregate functions that summarize the whole columns of the Oracle data: GROUPING, AVG, COUNT, STDDEV, MAX, MIN, SUM, & VARIANCE. Except for the COUNT (*), all the aggregate functions ignore nulls.

You can use the aggregate functions in the SQL statements, but not in the procedural statements. The Aggregate functions operate on whole columns unless you use the SELECT GROUP BY statement to sort the returned rows into subgroups. If you omit the GROUP BY clause, the aggregate functions treat all returned rows as a single group.

You call an aggregate the function using the syntax as shown below:

function_name([ALL | DISTINCT] expression)

Where the expression refers to one or more database columns. When you specify ALL (the default), the aggregate function consider all column values including the duplicates. When you specify DISTINCT, the aggregate function considers only the distinct values. For illustration, the statement below returns the number of various job titles in the database table emp:

SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT job) INTO job_count FROM emp;

The function COUNT specify the asterisk (*) choice, that returns the number of rows in a table. For illustration, the following statement returns the number of rows in a table emp:

SELECT COUNT (*) INTO emp_count FROM emp;