OraclePlus v1.0

Oracle Plus extends the Oracle JDBC driver to add functionality; specifically, the main purpose is to update the Oracle driver so that it is able to execute stored procedures which return result sets without requiring additional (proprietary) API calls to specify output parameters etc. This allows third party products such as report writers (eg JasperReports, Eclipse BIRT, etc) to execute stored procedures.

This may sound like an odd thing to do, given that there's nothing here that cannot be easily achieved by using the API in the first place but consider third party applications which operate on the results of user-specified SQL. Most are able to execute stored procedures without any additional effort - the user simply uses the appropriate syntax for invoking the stored procedure instead of a "select" statement.

This works because many databases/drivers will automatically return the result set from a stored procedure without needing any additional API calls, and this makes for a convenient solution for application writers. Oracle, on the other hand, requires that proprietary API extensions are used to explicitly specify an OUT parameter to carry the result set and retrieve the cursor. In other words, unless the application specifically supports Oracle extensions to the JDBC API, Oracle stored procedures cannot be used to provide result sets.

Oracle Plus solves this problem by extending the existing Oracle driver to make it conform to the JDBC API.

Note that Oracle Plus is not a replacement JDBC driver - it is a wrapper around the standard Oracle JDBC Driver that parses your SQL and seamlessly adds functionality. You will still need to provide your standard Oracle Client JDBC jar.