Assignments in pl/sql

The Variables and constants are initialized every time a block or subprogram is entered.
By default, the variables are initialized to NULL. Therefore, unless you expressly initialize the variable, its value is undefined, as the following illustration shows:

DECLARE
count INTEGER;
...
BEGIN
count := count + 1; -- assigns a null to count


The expression on the right side of the assignment operator yield NULL as count is null. To avoid the unpredicted results, never reference the variable before you assign it a value.

You can use assignment statements to assign the values to a variable. For illustration, the statement below assigns a new value to the variable bonus, overwriting its older value:

bonus := salary * 0.15;

The expression below the assignment operator can be randomly complex, but it must yield a datatype that is similar as or convertible to the datatype of the variable.