Track coding information

Once the development stage of the code base is over, it might be required to track through the code for search operation or to extract some crucial information for analysis or maintenance purposes. Such scenarios do not require thorough line-by-line digging as might seem to be the case. The line-by-line or code-by-code approach not only eats up a lot of time and resource but also ends up in a huge effort with tiny result. For this reason, Oracle supplies a set of dictionary views which make the life of analysts easy. The Oracle-supplied dictionary views are proven metadata sources of Oracle to provide accurate and detailed end results. The dictionary views used for tracking PL/SQL code information are ALL_ARGUMENTS, ALL_OBJECTS, ALL_SOURCE, ALL_PROCEDURES, and ALL_DEPENDENCIES.

The following diagram lists the dictionary views along with a brief description. Note that only ALL_* views are listed in the chart but, nevertheless, the same purpose is achieved by the other...