How to call stored procedures with non-scalar arguments - replicating old ALL_ARGUMENTS views

We have long had a fairly generic mechanism for calling stored procedures from our Java middle tier, using queries against ALL_ARGUMENTS in order to figure out the

signature of a procedure, and then map the types programmatically.

In recent versions of Oracle, the default behaviour of ALL_ARGUMENTS changed, such that it only contained top-level types. The justification was that

the information about package-level, rather than top-level types, was now available elsewhere (it had not been, previously), and that the recursive definition of

ALL_ARGUMENTS caused performance problems in large schemas with complicated nested argument types.

Oracle provided a facility to revert to the older behaviour (see