Art Trifonov's blog

In Part I we discussed views, stored procedures, and table functions as the three options of returning record sets from the code stored in the database. In this section I will concentrate on table functions, demonstrating several kinds of solutions that utilize this feature.

Having in my practice found many useful applications for table functions I am a big fan of this feature. Unfortunately, I don’t think it always gets the attention it deserves. Oracle documentation does a decent job of explaining how to code table functions, but the use cases they provide can lead one to believe this feature has no universal application and is meant to solve just a few specific kinds of problems.