Re: Oracle and PL/SQL vs. Oracle and Java

In article <3395E245.5EB8_at_tek.com.nojunk>, tim.ramberg_at_tek.com.nojunk wrote:
>Chad Theule wrote:
>>
>> As we round out Phase 1 and look ahead to the additional development
>> required, we are trying to evaluate the PL/SQL approach versus a Java
>> approach to application development.
>>
>
>Chad,
>
>I don't think you necessarily have to have an either/or with respect to
>PL/SQL verses Java. You can use each to thier seperate advantage (ie.
>Java for GUI and PL/SQL for database operations).
>

We are taking the same approach as Tim. We are using PL/SQL on the serverside and using Oracle's pl2java utility to create Java wrapper classes for these procedures. We are then using Java's RMI/object serialization to remotely invoke these classes on the database server and retrieve data from the PL/SQL stored procedures back to our Java client.

This has a lot of advantages over other approaches but the main ones are

• very thin Java client
• no SQL*Net is involved (either on the client or server although it could be used on the server to allow the RMI server classes to live on a different host than the database)
• no JDBC is involved (therefore no native JDBC drivers or JDBC/ODBC bridges)

Simple, scalabe and quite elegant really. The primary downside is that it ties you to Oracle as your database server although I imagine that other vendors have or are working on native Java access to their databases.

Jeff Richmond
Microtransfer Distributed Solutions Received on Sun Jun 08 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT