How do I declare and use variables in PL/SQL like I do in T-SQL?

Question

Revised Answer

If you’re not calling this code from another program, an option is to skip PL/SQL and do it strictly in SQL using bind variables:

var myname varchar2(20);

exec :myname := 'Tom';

SELECT *
FROM   Customers
WHERE  Name = :myname;

In many tools (such as Toad and SQL Developer), omitting the var and exec statements will cause the program to prompt you for the value.

Original Answer

A big difference between T-SQL and PL/SQL is that Oracle doesn’t let you implicitly return the result of a query. The result always has to be explicitly returned in some fashion. The simplest way is to use DBMS_OUTPUT (roughly equivalent to print) to output the variable:

DECLARE
   myname varchar2(20);
BEGIN
     myname := 'Tom';

     dbms_output.print_line(myname);
END;

This isn’t terribly helpful if you’re trying to return a result set, however. In that case, you’ll either want to return a collection or a refcursor. However, using either of those solutions would require wrapping your code in a function or procedure and running the function/procedure from something that’s capable of consuming the results. A function that worked in this way might look something like this:

CREATE FUNCTION my_function (myname in varchar2)
     my_refcursor out sys_refcursor
BEGIN
     open my_refcursor for
     SELECT *
     FROM   Customers
     WHERE  Name = myname;

     return my_refcursor;
END my_function;

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