Re: How to do a bitwise OR from SQL*Plus

"Kempf, Reed" wrote:
>
> There is a some good info on working with external procedures out on
> metalink and also on this orafaq document.
>

Just a note about external procedures. I'd rather not use them if many concurrent users need to call the routine. The reason is that every session will have a shadow 'runproc' program running, the purpose of which is to load on demand the routine from a shared library, execute and return the result - if you have many concurrent sessions the extra-load may be significant (not too mention that if you want C just to get better performance than with PL/SQL, you may be disappointed). It is of course OK if your connections are pooled or if your routines are used by a single batch program. There are also a number of concerns which may be a pain when coding :
- Oracle mention that runproc is currently (8i, unchecked with 9i) unthreaded, but they leave the option open for the future. Watch therefore critical sections and polish your semaphores. - Static variables are forbidden, because you do not control when the function is reloaded in memory (resetting everything). A workaround might be, if you need some persistence between successive calls, shared memory, but I still have to play with this. In brief, uncareful coding may lead to bugs, if not right now, in a near future, and they may be difficult to find then.

An alternative to consider would be, in my opinion, a dedicated 'service provider' daemon, which could answer requests through dbms_pipe - the 'give me a quote' example in the Oracle documentation for pipes is perfectly adequate. The 'service provider' could collect the information from a Reuters or Bloomberg flow and send it back, a certainly more efficient solution than external procedures getting the quote directly from the non-Oracle source. Of course, then you have the problem of starting/stopping the server, which is a non-problem with runproc.

My 0.02c.

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Stephane Faroult
Oriole Corporation
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Author: Stephane Faroult
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