1) Sorry but you cannot. Just as you could not close open files this program leaks. The program itself must fix its behavior. It would be a disaster to close some cursor before the program would actually be done with it -- how can you tell from "outside" that the cursor is obsolete? In any case, we have no facility to do that.


2) My book comes out in June 2001. It is about Developing in Oracle. It is geared towards both the DBA and the Developer with more of a developer slant. It is what I believe everyone programming against Oracle needs to know (or at least be aware of).. I cover the architecture of Oracle (the files, the memory, the processes). From there I go onto Locking and concurreny controls -- how transactions work, what happens with redo and rollback. Then I cover all of the different types of tables you can have (heap, IOT's, nested, object relational, b*tree clustered, hash clustered) and index types. Then we look at utilities such as imp/exp and SQLLDR -- trying to answer the frequently asked questions, info the utilities guide doesn't necessarily cover.

Application Tuning and Optimizer plan stability are covered next. My approach to tuning is a little different I think. You won't see "buffer cache hit ratio" mentioned once -- but you'll know how to make sense of the Oracle trace file and tkprof reports by the time you are done. I focus on application tuning (whereas most other books seem to focus on database instance tuning). I find 80% or more of the payback in tuning comes from there -- that is where I start.

The next section of the book goes into advance sql features where I discuss and show how to use

o analytic functions
o materialized view
o partitioning
o autonomous transactions
o dynamic sql (from a plsql point of view)

The I get into extensibility:

o intermedia text
o C based external procedures
o Java external procedures (java stored procs)
o Using object relational features

And finally some security related topics:

o Fine Grained Access control
o N-Tier authentication
o Invokers/Definers rights procedures (what it means and when to use them)

The last part is a pretty large appendix where I cover many of the supplied packages -- not in the sense that the supplied packages guide covers them, i expect you'll refer to that for the list of all functions and their inputs/outputs -- rather here I show how I use them, covering only the packages I find relevant (and haven't already covered earlier). About 18 packages in all....