As you may have noticed from the preceding section, SQL statements are very concise and powerful, but do not do more as a group than they do individually. Generally speaking, SQL statements operate independently, having little effect on one another. This is of limited use for writing programs, where you must create a body of code that is going to vary its behavior according to the data and to user or other input. To develop applications with SQL, you generally have to either interface it to a standard programming language such as C, or extend it so that it becomes a useful programming language in itself. Oracle supports both approaches, but the latter approach has many advantages that are relevant to the Web, and is therefore the approach that the Oracle WebServer takes.