Oracle Pipelined Table Functions
Basically, when you would like a PLSQL (or java or c) routine to be the «source»
of data -- instead of a table -- you would use a pipelined function.
PIPELINED functions will operate like a table.
A PL/SQL function may be used in a data warehouse database to transform large amounts of data. This might also involve massaging the data in a series of transformations, each performed by different functions.
virtual columns in 11g
Oracle has supported stored expressions for many years, in views and function-based indexes. Most commonly, views enable us to store and modularise computations and expressions based on their underlying tables' columns. In more recent versions (since around the 8i timeframe), we have been able to index expressions using function-based indexes.