Handling unnamed oracle exception

[pradeepbha]

Hi,
I was just reading through the oracle doc on "Handling PL/DQL errors". The doc says to handle unnamed oracle exception use the OTHERS handler or the pragma EXCEPTION_INIT...but i fail to understand why Oracle would have unnamed EXCEPTION in the first place.. why not give some name for those exceptions..

[cmpgenrl]

There are hundreds (thousands?) of Oracle error codes, and only a dozen or two have predefined names in PL/SQL. You can use EXCEPTION_INIT to associate a name of your choosing with an Oracle error code (I often use SNAPSHOT_TOO_OLD for -1555), if you want to handle a specific error.

Otherwise, an "WHEN OTHERS THEN ..." statement in an EXCEPTION block will handle anything not specifically handled already. I often use it to return NULL from a function when something unanticipated happens [like the DBA taking the database down :-) ].