SQL & PL/SQL

Hi All! I'm a SQL Server DBA, and I'm learning Oracle as I'm planning to become an Oracle DBA for many reasons.

I need the experts opinion on something here. To give you some perspective: it's very common to use stored procedures in SQL Server to return result sets, rather than ad hoc SQL because it is more manageable and secure (and at times performs better).

Can the same be said for Oracle Procedures, or is this completely different? I cringe at the idea of having to include ad hoc SQL in the application layer rather than calling a procedure which executes code stored inside Oracle.

So experts, how do you handle this? Do you have actual SQL code in your applications? Is it true that Oracle Procedures can only return result sets with cursors?

Thank you very much for putting up with my novice questions. :)

Justin