Re: How to "Enhance" Oracle ?

Hi,

Actually, if you take a look at Oracle 8, there you can add stuff in external procedures, and this allows you to write your own library of functions and then call then from within the database,

the external procedures are shared libs (linked) and the executable extproc runs these and then returns the result. extproc is like a server process started from the listener, so the listener in o8 has an extention, EXTPROC where you define this

so your oracle server process calls an external procedure by contacting the listener , that starts up extproc with the right library, calls the function you want and returns the result. this works well !

The reason this is done is for security reasons because the extproc calls the functions in a seperate address space, so whatever you do wrong in your c programming, will not screw up the working of the database (corrupt it or what not).

The only way you could do this in V7 is to write some sort of a daemon process in C that listens on dbms_pipe, and does all the stuff for you but this would make things very complicated no doubt.

hope this helps a bit,
cheers,

Wim Received on Tue Jan 13 1998 - 00:00:00 CST