Re: (Newbie) - how do I display output?

While Steph provided a short-term fix I would like to point out a couple of points related to dbms_output. First, it was introduced as a debugging tool and was not intended as a reporting tool. I do not think the first release even supported changing the buffer size. The default buffer was 2k and can be easily exhausted. Oracle has extended the serverout syntax to allow increasing the buffer size:

set serveroutput on size 1000000

Note that the buffer is not wirtten until the procedure completes. Also in the past every session that executed stored code that contained a dbms_output call, even if the call was not executed, was allocated a buffer from the shared pool. For this reason I would avoid using the routine in production code and instead turn to the utl_file package for writing files or insert into a logging table via an anonymous transaction for debugging information.

For reporting your pro* language programs provide the best performance and the most data presentation options.

HTH -- Mark D Powell -- Received on Tue Mar 01 2005 - 09:51:59 CST