I was prompted by a thread over at Dizwell and nearly wrote a long and perhaps unhelpful, perhaps posting guideline breaking rant there. So you get it here instead - sorry. Do be aware that this is emphatically not a rant about the individual post (largely why it isn't an appropriate forum response) but the state of wheel-reinvention in the Oracle world. The gist of the complaint is essentially

When I use DBMS_OUTPUT to debug pl/sql it isn't very helpful - it spews all the output at the end in one chunk, and has some limits as well in earlier versions. It means that you can't monitor long running operations.

My reaction is pretty much - that's what happens when you re-invent the wheel - or use the wrong tool. The original poster's complaint though is fairly common. What might we do about the problems they identify.