Re: Sybase or Oracle? (No flame wars please)

In article <32CC9821.61C_at_lvalue.com>,
>With Oracle you find some funny unexpected things, like, for instance,
>stored procedures could not return rows (at least in version 6). With

It still cannot do that in version 7.3. That's really annonying. But it always has user-defined functions. Sybase doesn't have that, despite the popular demand from user groups.

>Sybase, on the other hand, you all the time hit error messages not
>listed in the manual.

Sybase messages are more detailed and easier to understand. Oracle messages are short and harder to understand, and remind me of the old compiler messages I used to see on mainframe computers.

>User interface with Sybase is much less consistent (all those arguments
>to their sp's are completely different from one sp to another different
>order etc - if you are a DBA you know what i mean :-) Oracle is a bit
>more polished from this point of view - but it smells VMS so heavily
>that i just get kinda irritated sometimes.

Oracle doesn't have system supplied stored procs (such as sp_help in Sybase.) To do the equivalent of Sybase' "sp_help mytable" in Oracle requires you to manually issue several SELECT from various system catalogs. Now you may find some script on the net that does that already. But Oracle should have those things built in.

Oracle's way to print messages on the screen also suprises me. All the messages printed from a procedure are first stored the memory together. If you print 1 million messages (DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE()), you'll use up the memory cache.

Q Vincent Yin               |   Repeat 
vyin_at_cs.ubc.ca              |       delete(next->bug);
(604) 876-9096 (H)          |   Until 0 = 1;

-- 

Q Vincent Yin               |   Repeat 
vyin_at_cs.ubc.ca              |       delete(next->bug);
(604) 876-9096 (H)          |   Until 0 = 1;