Dates and Random Numbers in PL/SQL?

Hi,

 I'm starting my first sizable effort in PL/SQL programming and I'm stuck against two small walls. (My configuration is Oracle 7.3 and Oracle Webserver Cartridges).

 One thing I want to do is easily work with dates. I've seen functions to change the date, but not times (except for the time zone stuff). I'd like to write a function that does the following:   new_date := old_date + hours + minutes; Ie. I'd like to take a date and add an hour and/or minutes to it. I realize I could do this by converting it to a character string and doing all kinds of manipulations with it-- is there an easier way?

  Secondly, I'd like to generate _large_ highly random numbers. The random.rndint() utility with OWS2.1 generates randoms, but it seems to have problems generating any number beyond 9999. I'd like to generate a number between 0 and 10^9 if possible. I am currently planning to do this by generating a number of them and concat'ing them together. Are there any public domain routines for generating integers?

  Lastly, a general question: is anyone doing anything inventive for testing PL/SQL statements? Currently I've been doing stuff like:

SQL> declare

      foobar number;
     begin
      foobar := mypackage.myfunct(242);
      insert into temp values(tochar(foobar));
     end;

and such. I cannot believe there isn't a nice utility I should be using to get the return values printed out to my display?

I'd appreciate any help that you can offer. Many thanks for reading.

Regards,
Jason

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