I was extremely excited recently to discover that the CASE statement is finally supported in Oracle. I have also been playing with the incredibly powerful analytical functions.

However, while both of these features seem to come 'for free' in the SQL, they also do not appear to be supported by PL/SQL. A PL/SQL block that contains a SQL statement that includes any analytical function or case statement will fail compilation. I get one of the following errors returned:

ORA-06550: line 12, column 21:
PLS-00103: Encountered the symbol "(" when expecting one of the following:

ORA-06550: line 4, column 9:
PLS-00103: Encountered the symbol "CASE" when expecting one of the following:

Does anybody have any idea why this might be? This is going to be a major impedement to the implementation of these new, very powerful features. Of course, wrapping the statement in a string and doing an execute immediate on it works fine, but that is a really poor work-around.

Is there some package that must be run, or client upgrade, or some other equally obscure thing that must be done to enable these constructs under PL/SQL??

Thanks,

- Chris