Re: To the moderator

On Mon, 27 Apr 98 23:56:27 GMT, fred_at_genesis.demon.co.uk (Lawrence Kirby) wrote:

<snip>
>I doubt whether the Oracle libraries could be written entirely in terms
>of the standard C library. The problem is that that doesn't provide
>any locking or other means to create serialisation mechanisms. Also
>performance tends to be mportant for databases so commercial DBMSs tend to
>make use of whatever platform-specific magic is available to squeeze out
>that last bit of performance.

<snip>

Oracle runs on just about everything (except AS/400 (I know, there are other exceptions)) so, like anything else properly written to be portable, has a system-dependant layer. This layer would be written for some system by the original developers, and then handed to porters with comments like "do this the safest way you can", or "do this the fastest way you can" (or both). Anything above that layer has to be totally portable, and so has to be written strictly according to the language and library standards.

Eric Received on Sat May 02 1998 - 00:00:00 CDT