Oracle Stored Procedure with Alter command - sql

Question

I am trying to build an Oracle stored procedure which will accept a table name as a parameter. The procedure will then rebuild all indexes on the table.
My problem is I get an error while using the ALTER command from a stored procedure, as if PLSQL does not allow that command.

Answer 1

Use the execute immediate statement to execute DDL inside PL/SQL.
create procedure RebuildIndex(index_name varchar2) as
begin
execute immediate 'alter index ' || index_name || ' rebuild';
end;
I tested this code; it works.

Answer 2

Documentation.
Passing Schema Object Names As Parameters
Suppose you need a procedure that
accepts the name of any database
table, then drops that table from your
schema. You must build a string with a
statement that includes the object
names, then use EXECUTE IMMEDIATE to
execute the statement:
CREATE TABLE employees_temp AS SELECT last_name FROM employees;
CREATE PROCEDURE drop_table (table_name IN VARCHAR2) AS
BEGIN
EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'DROP TABLE ' || table_name;
END;
/
Use concatenation to build the string,
rather than trying to pass the table
name as a bind variable through the
USING clause.
In addition, if you need to call a
procedure whose name is unknown until
runtime, you can pass a parameter
identifying the procedure. For
example, the following procedure can
call another procedure (drop_table) by
specifying the procedure name when
executed.
CREATE PROCEDURE run_proc (proc_name IN VARCHAR2, table_name IN VARCHAR2) ASBEGIN
EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'CALL "' || proc_name || '" ( :proc_name )' using table_name;
END;
/
If you want to drop a table with the
drop_table procedure, you can run the
procedure as follows. Note that the
procedure name is capitalized.
CREATE TABLE employees_temp AS SELECT last_name FROM employees;
BEGIN
run_proc('DROP_TABLE', 'employees_temp');
END;
/

Answer 3

Here are a couple of possibilities. First, you would have to treat the SQL as dynamic SQL. Second, Oracle DDL statements cannot be run in a transaction (or, they terminate the current transaction and cannot themselves be rolled back). This may affect whether you can use them in stored procedures, or where you can use stored procedures that contain them.
If none of the above apply at all - there could easily be something else astray - I suggest posting some code.