Hot discussion: SQL or PL/SQL

I read Rob, Laurent and Chen on this topic. As far as I follow OTN SQL and PL/SQL forum is the place for SQL madness, any kind of question here is discussed in a race to have a more performant single SQL solution. Oracle provides very rich SQL options like analytic, xml and data mining functions or model clause for this kind of a race.

Additionally we know by experience that any data intensive need will have several different solutions and *usually* one set based SQL solutions will be faster than its alternatives especially row based(cursor looping) PL/SQL ones. So parallel to the need there can be exceptions, you may check Nicolas Gasparotto‘s approach on this example with pipelined PL/SQL function option.

IMHO if you are not solving a puzzle but developing an application in a team, PL/SQL based solutions are easier to understand for all team members and as a result it is easier to maintain the application in long run. After all performance is not the single metric for an application’s success, PL/SQL provides exception handling and is also rich with bulk processing and pipelined functions kind of options for related performance needs.