Back in the late 80s, some big brains at Oracle realized that an operating system independent language was needed to build applications on top of Oracle Database (and our SQL implementation). Their rapidly growing customer base was writing applications in C (making calls to SQL via the OCI layer), and that was problematic. Code needed to be ported, re-tested, etc. for variations of the C compiler on different systems. And C wasn't very easy to write. They dreamed of programs, running inside the database itself, which could be moved from operating system to operating system, and not require any changes. "Write once, run anywhere (there's an Oracle Database)." Thus was PL/SQL born, as a sort of step-child of Ada (the syntax of PL/SQL was taken almost directly from Ada specs, to avoid having to invent an entirely new language). It's such a great language that: It offers the best performance for executing SQL in Oracle Database. It provides a simple yet p...
For the last twenty years, I have managed to transform an obsession with PL/SQL into a paying job. How cool is that?