The Advantages Of Declaring The Record As A ROWTYPE in PLSQL

You do not need to explicitly declare variables for all the columns in a table.  If you alter the column specification in the database table, you do not need to update the code. 

The disadvantage of declaring the record as a ROWTYPE is: When you create a record as a ROWTYPE, fields will be created for all the columns in the table and memory will be used to create the data type for all the fields. So use ROWTYPE only when you are using all the columns of the table in the program.

The use of the data type %ROWTYPE: The data type %ROWTYPE is used for declaring a variable whose type is that of an entire row from a table.  In other words, a variable of this type would hold a complete record from a table.  Example:

declare

 nRecord emp%rowtype;

 nFactor constant number (4, 2) := 1.11;

 begin

  select * into nRecord from emp where empno=7934;

  if nRecord.sal <2000 then

  update emp set sal=sal*nFactor  where empno=7934;

  end if;

  end;

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.