Re: Database for gnome

[Charles Shannon Hendrix <shendrix escape widomaker com>]

In message <19980207153107.38226@inch.com>, Peter Norton writes:

> [Note, I've added all of oracle's "*"'s to their product names because
> they make the names look silly] 

They do a fine job looking silly on their own... :)

> SQL*Net is a protocol that oracle defines which is essentially layered on
> top of Oracle's CLI (or as they call it OCI, Oracle Call-level Interface),

We can stop here.

I thought you were suggesting Perl was layered on top of the CLI as
in ``command line interface''.  I did that once to get Oracle access
really quick.

I never heard OCI called CLI... silly me.

So you can see why I mentioned SQL*Plus... I know how it works.

> rough approximation of the layout of your table "tablename".  This sure
> isn't defined anywhere in SQL - it's something oracle does to make their
> product more useable.

Yep... and it SHOULD be part of SQL.  How insane to not be able to list
the fields in a table.  Bah!

> > Why?  Doesn't it already have one?
> 
> It seems like the DBD::Oracle distribution goes out of it's way to point
> out that the only currently stable interface is Oraperl, and that the DBI
> interface is far from final.  It's been that way for the last year, so I
> presume that there are still issues to be worked out.

Nevermind then.  Its version numbers keep going up so I assume someone
is doing something.  It works fine for me as it is.  Nice to be able to
change one line in your program and move from Sybase to Oracle.

I think Oraperl and Sybperl were nicer of course, but not much.

> Perl is far too much overhead to incurr to make a job like this possible.

No, its silly to bother.  But it is NOT impossible.  WWW servers do it
all the time. 

This is, after all, the concept of an ORB.  It would have the same
problem if it also was executed per call.

But I'm not suggesting it be done anyway.