12c: fun with WITH!

Last night I couldn’t sleep and what else you’re going to do? I was thinking about Oracle stuff.

In Oracle version 12, Oracle has enhanced the WITH clause – traditionally used for sub-query factoring – to allow the declaration of functions and procedures. This can be (ab)used to create a very interesting scenario, that is not very common in Oracle: Reading data within the same SELECT statement, but from two different points in time. And the points in time are in the future, and not in the past.

Let’s say I want to take a snapshot of the current SCN, and then another one 5 or 10 seconds after that. Traditionally we’d have to store that somewhere. What if I could take two snapshots – at different SCNs – using a single SELECT statement ? Without creating any objects ?

col value for a50
set lines 200 pages 99
with
procedure t (secs in number, scn out varchar2)
  is
    pragma autonomous_transaction;
  begin
    dbms_lock.sleep(secs);
    select 'at ' || to_char(sysdate,'HH24:MI:SS') || ' SCN: '
                 || dbms_flashback.get_system_change_number
      into scn
      from dual;
  end;
function wait_for_it (secs in number)
 return varchar2 is
    l_ret varchar2(32767);
  begin
    t(secs, l_ret);
    return l_ret;
  end;
select 1 as time, 'at ' || to_char(sysdate,'HH24:MI:SS') || ' SCN: '
                || dbms_flashback.get_system_change_number as value
  from dual
union all
select 5, wait_for_it(5) from dual
union all
select 10, wait_for_it(5) from dual
/

      TIME VALUE
---------- --------------------------------------------------
         1 at 09:55:49 SCN: 3366336
         5 at 09:55:54 SCN: 3366338
        10 at 09:55:59 SCN: 3366339

We can clearly see there, that the SCN is different, and the time shown matches the intervals we’ve chosen, 5 seconds apart. I think there could be some very interesting uses for this. What ideas can you folks come up with ?