Managing Processes for External Procedures

External procedures are procedures written in one language that are called from another program in a different language. An example is a PL/SQL program calling one or more C routines that are required to perform special-purpose processing.

These callable routines are stored in a dynamic link library (DLL), or a libunit in the case of a Java class method, and are registered with the base language. Oracle Database provides a special-purpose interface, the call specification (call spec), that enables users to call external procedures from other languages.

To call an external procedure, an application alerts a network listener process, which in turn starts an external procedure agent. The default name of the agent is extproc, and this agent must reside on the same computer as the database server. Using the network connection established by the listener, the application passes to the external procedure agent the name of the DLL or libunit, the name of the external procedure, and any relevant parameters. The external procedure agent then loads, DLL or libunit, runs the external procedure, and passes back to the application any values returned by the external procedure.

To control access to DLLs, the database administrator grants execute privileges on the appropriate DLLs to application developers. The application developers write the external procedures and grant execute privilege on specific external procedures to other users.

The environment for calling external procedures, consisting of tnsnames.ora and listener.ora entries, is configured by default during the installation of your database. You may need to perform additional network configuration steps for a higher level of security. These steps are documented in the Oracle Database Net Services Administrator's Guide.