Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!think!bloom-beacon!apple!voder!wlbr!mh
From: mh@wlbr.EATON.COM (Mike Hoegeman)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Oracle (sorta long)
Message-ID: <23173@wlbr.EATON.COM>
Date: 11 Sep 88 17:49:15 GMT
References: <6658@ems.Ems.MN.ORG>
Reply-To: mh@wlbr.eaton.com.UUCP (Mike Hoegeman)
Organization: Eaton IMSD, Westlake Village, CA
Lines: 69

In article <6658@ems.Ems.MN.ORG> mpp@ems.Ems.MN.ORG (Michael Palmquist) writes:
>I've used a few different databases to develop applications --
>in (ACK!) MS-DOS with Q&A & Paradox and in Unix with UNIFY.
>
>I'm wondering has anyone used any of these and used Oracle.
>How does Oracle compare?  What are its best features?  Does
>anything about it suck -- ah, I mean, are there any drawbacks?
>
>Thanks for any knowledgeable responses!
>
>Michael Palmquist

here's some ramblings you find of interest about my experiences with
oracle...

I don't have much experience with other dbms's but I have used Oracle
quite a bit. We don't use oracle's forms package and other things like
that much around here since we have our own user interface package
using Sun Microsystems NeWS window manager.  As a result most of the
experience I have with oracle is through using the C language
interfaces to it.

What little experience i do have with SQL*forms (their forms package)
leads me to believe it's pretty good for doing straight database
applications with. If you want to inteface it with other applications
or db's though it's either...

	1) a royal pain in the *ss
	2) impossible

Depending on what you want to do.  Which in my opinion is OK as long as
you give people a good programming language interface to your db so
they can do their interface if they like. Though I don't have much to
compare it to, Oracle's C interface is coherent and works well. The
C interface manual could be a lot better but it's usable. The SQL
manuals in their various flavors are good.

We use Oracle here on suns and on vms vaxes.  One thing you should know
is that SQL is the ONLY interface into Oracle. Anything you do MUST be
done through SQL one way or another. All C (or whatever language you
use) interfaces parse sql statements and do the resulting underlying
database operations. So If You're not happy with just plain 'ol SQL you
won't be happy with Oracle.  If SQL is what you after then Oracle is
not a bad way to go.  In short , do some research on SQL if you are not
familiar with it before you go out and get oracle to see if it meets
your needs.

Sun OS unix version:

As far as performance goes, the version of oracle for sunOS unix is
pretty good Oracle also has a product called SQL*NET which allows You
to have a single server machine run the oracle kernel and have all the
other machines access it as if the db was sitting on the local machine.
SQL*NET uses tcp/ip. This doesn't degrade performance noticeably and
works well.

Vax vms version:

The vaxVMS version goes it works but it's considerably slower than the
sun UNIX version. The SQL*NET server for vms via tcp/ip is just plain
unusable so if you want to use a vms vax as a SQL*NET server via tcp/ip
forget it unless they've just done some major overhaul to it..  I would
suspect the vax Ultrix version of oracle works pretty much like the
sunOS version. If you have a vax and plan to use oracle on it , I
really encourage you to use the ultrix version and not the vms
version. 

hope this helps.

-mike