How do I add a SLEEP to a PL/SQL Stored Procedure?

Over the last couple of releases, Oracle has added several handy PL/SQL packages and procedures you might not know about. So, I put together a short blog series highlighting some of my favorites. First up, DBMS_SESSION.SLEEP().

Oracle has always enabled you to add a sleep command to your stored procedures to suspend a session for a specified number of seconds, as shown in the code below.

    DECLARE
       v_start TIMESTAMP;
       v_end   TIMESTAMP; 
    BEGIN
       v_start := SYSTIMESTAMP;
       -- Sleep for 10 seconds
       DBMS_LOCK.SLEEP(10);
       v_end   := SYSTIMESTAMP;
       DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('This procedure started at ' ||v_start);
       DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('This procedure ended   at ' ||v_end);
    END;
   /
 
This PROCEDURE started AT 10-SEP-22 12.39.40.587041 AM
This PROCEDURE ended   AT 10-SEP-22 12.39.50.637738 AM
 
PL/SQL PROCEDURE successfully completed.
Elapsed: 00:00:10.02

However, the sleep function was part of the DBMS_LOCK package, which is not granted to PUBLIC, by default, due to the other more powerful functions inside that package. That means you had to beg the DBA or the security team to give you access to this package just to put your session to sleep for a few minutes.

DBMS_SESSION.SLEEP()

Things got a lot easier starting in Oracle Database 18c, as the sleep function is now available in the DBMS_SESSION package, which is granted to PUBLIC by default. That means you can call the function without any additional privileges. Plus, the function code in DBMS_SESSION.SLEEP is identical to DBMS_LOCK.SLEEP, so you can do a simple find and replace in your code!

DECLARE
       v_start TIMESTAMP;
       v_end   TIMESTAMP; 
    BEGIN
       v_start := SYSTIMESTAMP;
       -- Sleep for 10 seconds
       DBMS_SESSION.SLEEP(10);
       v_end   := SYSTIMESTAMP;
       DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('This procedure started at ' ||v_start);
       DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('This procedure ended   at ' ||v_end);
   END;
   /
This PROCEDURE started AT 10-SEP-22 12.39.40.587041 AM
This PROCEDURE ended   AT 10-SEP-22 12.39.50.637738 AM
PL/SQL PROCEDURE successfully completed.
Elapsed: 00:00:10.02