How to handle “no data found” error in Oracle PL/SQL

This simple and short post covers information about how you can handle “No data found” error in Oracle PL/SQL.

I am very much comfortable with Microsoft SQL Server but as a requirement of one of my project I recently started to work on ORACLE and at very early stage I faced an error “No data found” which occurs when you do select into some variable with some conditions in where clause.

In SQL, it gets automatically handled when there is no data or output of particular select and you tries to do select into but in oracle it throws due to which you need to do double-check just to ensure that data exists.

Suppose there is one table called ‘employee’ which has records for employee id 1 to 10 and if you wrote a query like below.

Select emp_name into v_emp_name from employee where emp_id = 11;

In above case it will throw an error no data found as table employee doesn’t gold record for employee whose id is 11.

So to handle above case we have two choices. One is to check the count before select into statement like below.

declare v_emp_count number;v_emp_name varchar2(20);
begin
select count(*) into v_emp_count from employee where emp_id  = 11;
if (v_emp_count > 0) then
   select emp_name into v_emp_name from employee where emp_id = 11;
else
   v_emp_name  := null;
end if;
end;

Another way is handle exception like below.

declare v_emp_count number;v_emp_name varchar2(20);
begin
   select emp_name into v_emp_name from employee where emp_id = 11;
EXCEPTION
    when no_data_found then
      v_emp_name  := null;
 end;

Hope you have found this post useful. If you any other better alternative do share in comment section below. Thanks.