Tracking PL/SQL coding information

The Oracle-supplied dictionary views are a great source of information for performing drill-down analysis of PL/SQL code. Although there are several dictionaries that store PL/SQL object information, the important ones are USER_ARGUMENTS, USER_OBJECTS, USER_SOURCE, USER_PROCEDURES, and USER_DEPENDENCIES. These views also have their ALL_* and DBA_* counterparts. For your reference, the USER, ALL, and DBA category views are described as follows:

• USER: Contains only the objects that are owned by a user

• ALL: Contains the objects that can be accessed by a user

• DBA: Contains all the objects accessible by the SYS user or a user with DBA privileges

You can query the data dictionary views from the DICTIONARY view and their column structure from DICT_COLUMNS view. Let us query the metadata information of the procedure P_CALC_USER_POINTS in these dictionary views.

USER_ARGUMENTS

The USER_ARGUMENTS view captures the argument information of a PL/SQL program. The argument...