Sometimes I am faced with a situation where I need to know the source for a view or a procedure or a function. Fortunately Oracle stores the source in the database.

First I check to see what kind of object whose source I need is.

SQL> select object_name,object_type,status from user_objects where object_name = 'FOO';

If the object is a table I can simply recreate the table by doing a desc on that object.

SQL> desc FOO;

If the object is a function or stored procedure you can find its source in the user_source table.

SQL> select text from user_source where name = 'FOO' order by line;

If the object is a view you can find its source in the user_views table.

SQL> select text from user_views where view_name = 'FOO';

If the output seems to be truncated it is because text is of type LONG which is a big binary field. To allow more output do this.

SQL> set long 4000

Thanks to this article and this forum for helping me figure this out.