Sending SMS from Oracle (abuse warning)

Ok, this post is mostly to annoy people who think stuff like this should be done from the application layer. I do agree with them but these things can done from the db layer as well.
Anyway, here is a little code sniplet to send a SMS text message from the database just using a insert statement. The SMS provider we use at work for basic Nagios alerts and stuff like that is Sign.Up To, cheap and quite reliable (they did have some downtime yesterday though). To send the actually message we use a trigger which in turn calls the quite handy (and abusive) dbms package utl_http, utl_http works in Oracle 8 and up (including XE).
If you haven't got utl_http installed you can do so by running the two scripts ?/rdbms/admin/utlhttp.sql and ?/rdbms/admin/prvthttp.plb as sysdba on the server. The response you get back is either a message id or the keyword "fail" if the message fails for some reason, the trigger simply catch that message and store it a table.
This code is just proof of concept and should not be used for anything "real", no error handeling or input checking. It just sends off the data to the message aggregator. And it can't handle any fancy characters in the message nor spaces. You can easily implement basic URL encoding using this function written by Tome Kyte.

create table smslog (
        sms_id number(8),
        smsno varchar2(18) not null,
        message varchar2(160) not null,
        status varchar2(150),
        sendtime date
);

alter table smslog add constraint
  smslog_pk primary key (sms_id);

create sequence smslog_pk_seq;

CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER smslog_insert_trigger
  BEFORE INSERT ON smslog FOR EACH ROW
DECLARE
  req   UTL_HTTP.REQ;
  resp  UTL_HTTP.RESP;
  val   VARCHAR2(2000);
  url   VARCHAR2(300);
BEGIN
  url := 'http://sms.sign-up.to/smpp_send.php?username=username&from=oracle&
account=account_no&password=yourpassword&
message='||:new.message||'&to='||:new.smsno;
  req := UTL_HTTP.BEGIN_REQUEST(url);
  UTL_HTTP.SET_HEADER(req, 'User-Agent', 'Mozilla/4.0 Oracle');
  resp := UTL_HTTP.GET_RESPONSE(req);
  UTL_HTTP.READ_LINE(resp, val, TRUE);
  UTL_HTTP.END_RESPONSE(resp);
  :new.status := val;
  :new.sendtime := sysdate;
  SELECT smslog_pk_seq.nextval INTO :new.sms_id FROM dual;
END smslog_insert_trigger;
/

-- And a sample sent message.SQL> insert into smslog(message,smsno) 
  2  values('Eat_more_fruit','4479697xxxxx');

1 row created.

SQL> select * from smslog;

 SMS_ID SMSNO           MESSAGE              STATUS        SENDTIME
------- --------------- -------------------- ------------- ---------
      1 4479697xxxxx    Eat_more_fruit       3211821       06-SEP-06