Thanks to all for your feedback. My comments about row vs. set processing are based on PL/SQL's inability to return multi-row records without going through contortions to place the results in a table of records via SELECT INTO or BULK COLLECT, and an equally complicated method for retrieving the results via a simple command line tools like sqlplus.
Perhaps one of you PL/SQL experts can show how to return more than a single record within a PL/SQL block.
>1 begin
2 select * from v$instance;
3 end;
ERROR at line 2:
ORA-06550: line 2, column 1:
PLS-00428: an INTO clause is expected in this SELECT statement