How to use Oracle's dbms_standard package

Question

How does one use the dbms_standard package from Oracle? (Version 10g)

It's not described in the document PL/SQL Packages and Types Reference 10g Release 2 (10.2) B14258-02.

Answer 1

Oracle doesn't document it, because Oracle doesn't intend for its functionality to be directly used. This is the basic definitions for the SQL environment. You will see type definitions such as FLOAT, REAL, INTEGER, CHAR, etc. in here. Here is where functions that implement language features like SQLERRM are defined.

Why wouldn't they provide documentation for those that want it? Because Oracle wants and needs to be able to change this stuff at will, from release to release. They don't want to have any responsibility for applications that make use of the features in here when they break because Oracle needed to change something. Providing documentation encourages its use.

EDIT:

For the curious, you can take a peek at %ORACLE_HOME%\RDBMS\Admin\stdspec.sql (package spec) and stdbody.sql (package body), which are executed by the standard.sql script. WARNING: don't modify them! These files are in the RDBMS server Oracle home, not the client home.