Consuming Web Services using PL/SQL

For the last couple of days..I’ve been studying how to consume web services within the Oracle database using PL/SQL..

A quick glance at my personal library (Google!)…led me to conclude that there are two major ways to do this:

• Build your own SOAP API using the UTL_HTTP package for the HTTP requests (mandatory for anyone using 9i or older) ;
• Use the UTL_DBWS package available in 10g that provides all the essential methods to consume web services

In my particular case I’m building my own API, solely because I couldn’t consume the desired web service via HTTPS.

I lost a lot of time searching how to consume a web service over HTTPS using the UTL_DBWS package, with little success, and frustrated I decided to go with the first solution.

Using the UTL_HTTP package with a Oracle Wallet, I successfully consumed web service over HTTPS with little effort. This was achieved using the following procedure, before the HTTP request:

utl_http.SET_WALLET(your_wallet_path, your_wallet_pass);

Pretty simple and straight forward…

I’ll post more related code tomorrow from my PC at work..

Meanwhile I started working on FTP and SFTP (not confuse with FTPS) from the database, which I’ll post some examples in the next days!

Any doubts or feedback be sure to comment or send me an e-mail!

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