Re: Visual Basic and Oracle

rbamba_at_hotmail.com wrote in message <887242066.1459027978_at_dejanews.com>...

>At my work place, we are currently using Visual Basic (3.0, 4.0 - 16 bit,
>5.0) as the application development tool with SQL Server 6.5 as our
>database. We are thinking about moving to ORACLE 8 as our back-end. I
>have the following questions:
>
>1. Has anybody out there made a similar move already? If so, what where
>your experiences? Was it a seamless move (yeah, right!)?

It basically required a rewrite to all database access routines due to the way stored procs differs between SQL-Server and Oracle. Nothing seamless about it at all. :-)

>2. How easy/efficient is it to use VB in conjuction with Oracle? Is
>there any sort of performance penalty?

Well, all my experiences with Oracle ODBC drivers have not been good. I've never used Oracle ODBC for high volume OLTP, but have run into several anyoing bugs with various vendor's Oracle ODBC drivers. As for performance, I would think that the Microsoft SQL-Server ODBC driver has reached maturity, is robust, with performance getting close to using native DB-Lib. I doubt that this can be said of Oracle ODBC drivers - afterall, how many high volume Oracle clients are out there that actually use ODBC instead of native SQL*Net? And such environments are required to push the development of robust and fast ODBC drivers.

>3. Are there any tools which can help convert from VB apps to ORACLE
forms?

Doubt it. Developer-2000 can generate both VB and Forms code, but it's only a code generator and not a converter. I have never really worked with Forms (played around with it a bit), but know some VB programmers that got suck into doing Forms development - they became frustrated caffeine addicts after Forms... :-)

I would recommend not using Forms. There are more good VB programmers available than Form programmers. VB is more flexible than Forms. And using proper OO design, the VB application will have a much longer life cycle than a generated Dev2000 Forms application. Finally, with VB the integration of the app into e-mail, OLE2, DSS software etc. will be much easier. Remember that Forms is a db client development tool. Period. VB and Delphi for example is *much* more than just that.

regards,
Billy Received on Thu Feb 12 1998 - 00:00:00 CST