OOW 2012: Is PL/SQL still alive?

Yesterday Bryn Llewellyn, Distinguished Product Manager, did a session called "PL/SQL Enhancements brought by the latest generation of database technology". The room was packed. For the upcoming release of the Oracle 12c database the enhancements were broken into three areas:

• Improved PL/SQL and SQL interoperability

  In the current version of the Oracle database you needed a Nested Table or Varray Type defined at schema level in order to be able to use it in the TABLE operator. This is no longer necessary, it can be a PL/SQL declared type.The types that can be used as bind variables has been extended: Boolean, Nested Tables can be used as bindvariable in Dynamic SQL.Subquery Factoring (the With clause if you will) can hold private functions, the use case presented for this: pretty print an integer in K, M, G, T.Using userdefined PL/SQL functions in a SQL statement is not advisable, but if you really need to there is a new pragma: PRAGMA UDF.