I usually tend to ignore those urgent threads on OTN, but this one made me curious: URGENT:extracting a query from a procedure. Oracle does provide some sort of cross reference, dependencies, between PL/SQL code (packages, functions, etc.) and other objects, including tables and views, through the [dba|all|user]_dependencies view, yet displaying the complete SQL statement inside a package is left to scanning the [dba|all|user]_source view. After taking a look at that thread, I decided to see for myself, how difficult this problem is and wrote another small article: Extracting SQL statements from PL/SQL

Finally overcoming my writing blockade, here's something I found recently.

During a discussion in the OTN XE Forum (which, unfortunately, requires additional authentification) in the thread ISV - Bundle Oracle XE install into Software Install I suggested to use a seed db for software installation as shown in the installation process of XE.

Since Oracle provides said installation procedure as shell scripts (both Windows and Linux), I took a peek at the script rmanRestoreDatafiles.sql in the directory /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/config/scripts. Seems like this installation process uses an internal package for recovering the necessary tablescripts instead of a RMAN call, as shown in the shell scripts backup.sh or restore.sh in the same directory.

The name of that installation script hints that DBMS_BACKUP_RESTORE is a wrapper for RMAN, however I couldn't find a chapter on this in the 10g2 documentation, only a few references, for example an error message. Anyway, according to that script DBMS_BACKUP_RESTORE has several procedures/functions with names that seem self explanatory:

deviceAllocate
restoreSetDataFile
restoreDataFileTo
restoreBackupPiece
deviceDeallocate