Re: Oracle Designer vs VB?

> For the following reasons:
> VB 5 has better third party support.
> VB 5 has programmer aided debug support which many feel is superior to
> Oracle
> Great knowledge on VB 5 and symposium(stacks of users using it and easy
 to
> get support this is an important one)
> VB 5 Has great support to external applications Via OLE which is
 important
> when you need to capture/put data from Word, Excel, Project etc
>
> So get the best of both worlds Oracle back end VB Front end, mix the
best.

These are valid points, but are not the whole story. There are other factors. But first, let's look at this comment from the questioner:

> >My question basically is which is better. I am a junior grade programmer

Better? what is better? what's your context? what are your goals? There are very few things that are so obviously 'better' that you can just say 'this is better' without specifying FOR WHAT.

For instance: If you are looking for portability, I.E. you are going to connect to an oracle database, and possibly a sybase database, and possibly an access database, then VB is definitely better. Dev/2000 only does Oracle. If however, you are definitely going to stick with Oracle, then you may want to have a closer look. The advantages of Dev/2000 over VB for Oracle include the fact that Dev/2000 does *not* use odbc, so it is significantly faster. Second, I have heard that there are security problems with odbc used this way. Third, Dev/2000 is able to do optimizing that VB cannot (at least not without a lot of manual effort). Using PL/SQL and cursors, you can have the server do most of your work, and return only a small results set.

> >My question basically is which is better. I am a junior grade programmer
> >and am not sure I want to switch languages. On one hand it could be very
> >good for me. My main concern is will i limit myself in the future in the
> >type of jobs i can find. I feel that Oracle will be at large corps only
 and
> >VB could be used at large and small companies alike. Are Oracle tools as
> >common as VB. What is the ease of use factor like. We had a designer
 demo
> >from Oracle. It looks real good but what is the reality of the
> >situation.Any opinions are welcome. Please e-mail your response as well
> as

You are examining the demand side of the equation very closely, and not paying much attention to the supply side. True, there are far more jobs for VB programmers, but there are far far far more VB programmers. ANYONE can claim to be a VB programmer. It is truly quite easy to learn, at least the BASICs (sorry). Dev/2000 is more difficult to learn, especially when you consider Oracle's always-poor documentation. But there *are* books, and if you can get your employer to pay for the FORMS course, jump at it! Given a VB job and a FORMS job, the latter will virtually always pay better. Received on Fri May 23 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT