Calling a C program from PL/SQL 2

You can use winrsh to call your C program.

Two ways to do this: the old way and the new way.<br>
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The old way involved using the DBMS_PIPE pipe between the PL/SQL procedure/function/trigger and a "C" program. This package became part of the Oracle RDBMS with 7.0, but there were lots of bugs prior to 7.1.6. It's not very documented in the standard Oracle doc-set, but I'm certain that Steve Feuerstein explained it thoroughly in at least one of his three books on PL/SQL! It's possible that an example is available on Oracle Support's "Metalink" site (support.oracle.com/metalink)...<br>
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The "new" way came in with Oracle8.0, and it is "external procedures", documented in chapter 10 of the PL/SQL reference manual. Again, I'm sure that Steve has documented it thoroughly, and there may be code fragments or other help on MetaLink...<br>
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Last, the older Oracle Procedural Gateway product included an SDK (software developers kit), of which only 6 copies were ever sold (I've been told)! As a result, Oracle pulled it off the market, but if that's not true, you can build a really high-end custom solution with the PGDK. To be honest, I think the "external procedures" functionality occupies the same space as the old PGDK, so it probably wouldn't be money well spent!<br>
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Hope this helps...<br>
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-Tim

Update on my previous answer: I recently had the pleasure of using "external procedures" on two recent engagements, and it's great! It's well-documented ("Oracle8 PL/SQL Reference", chapter 10 and "Oracle8 Administration", chapter on "Managing Processes" and demos in "$ORACLE_HOME/plsql/demo") and provides great performance. No memory leaks or anything like that. I was using v8.0.5 on both occasions, once on HP-UX 11 and the other time on Solaris 2.x (not sure which version)...<br>
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...it's much less complicated than the old PGDK...