Using EXEC() AT with Oracle DB

My previous blog was about using OPENQUERY() method with an Oracle DB. The advantage of using this method call is to pass through a query to a linked server such as Oracle server and to leverage the Oracle server to do the job. The great benefit of this strategy is to obtain much fast performance compared to using a T-SQL query directly against an Oracle database object locally at SQL server.

However, when I tried OPENQUERY next day. I was so disappointed. What I found is that the query passed to OPENQUERY() must be a literal string, no variable or expression is supported. That means I cannot build a query string dynamically with different constrains. This greatly limits the usage of OPENQUERY. I just cannot use it in my projects.

Fortunately, I found another pass-through way to leverage Oracle's power to query data, and it is possible to pass result back. I spent about one and half day to figure it out. I posted several questions to StackOverflow web site but I did not get any answer there. Eventually I got the solution through Google searching. I posed my answer to StackOverflow as well.

The method is to use "EXEC (...) AT ..." to the job:

EXEC (@sql) AT linedOracleServer;

Actually, there are some good examples of using this method. However, all those examples are using either Microsoft SQL server or Express SQL server. By using pass-through query, the syntax of the query is very different from Microsoft SQL server and Oracle SQL server. That's why it took me a while to figure it out.

I can build an Oracle SQL query to combine all the inputs into a query string. That's an easy part. The most challenge issue is to pass results as output parameters. For example, I need to get total count of rows in an Oracle table with WHERE clause, and pass the result out to my SQL server.

Here is what I did:

DECLARE @sql NVARCHAR(MAX);
DECLARE @myCount INT;
-- Initialize setting
SET @myCount = NULL;
-- Build sql query
SET @sql = N'
BEGIN
  SELECT COUNT(*) INTO :myCount
    FROM owner.myTable
    WHERE id = ' + CAST(@id AS VARCHAR) + N';
END;';
EXEC (@sql, @myCount OUTPUT) AT linedOracleServer;
IF (@myCount IS NOT NULL)
BEGIN
  PRINT 'I get the count from my Oracle table: ' + 
    CAST(@myCount AS VARCHAR);
END
ELSE
BEGIN
  PRINT 'It must be an query syntax error';
END

The key points to build an Oracle query with an output parameter is to follow these steps:

• making sure the query being a valid Oracle PL/SQL query such as SELECT ... INTO ... to assign result to a variable or parameter;
• using ":" before a parameter name;
• using an anonymous block (BEGIN...END) to wrap the query; and
• Appending ";" at the "END" block.

One lesson I learned from this practice is that exceptions raised by "EXE () AT" may provide misleading error messages. For example, when I used "@" for parameter or missed ";" after END. I got somethink like "illegal characters in expression". You have to open your view in all different angles.