Re: Oracle 8 Conversion

In message <360c8955.12716922_at_allnews.nbnet.nb.ca>, <scottd_at_nbnet.nb.ca> (Don Scott) wrote:
>
> Can anyone supply information (or an URL) where I can obtain general
> information on converting an Oracle 6 application up to Oracle 8?
> Mostly, I am looking for a list of "things to consider" that someone
> else has already considered (or failed at).

Funny you should mention this, as I just completed such an upgrade. Actually, what I did was replace the "DBMS = V6" precompiler flag with "DBMS = V7", and build with the 7.3.X precompiler/libraries. This allows us to support our existing customer base on 7.3, and allows connection to Oracle 8 databases.

Note that the precompiler manual (one of them) has a table of the changes that you'll need to make.

The three big changes for us were:

1. Use indicator variables for when selecting from columns that are NULLable. V6 will let this pass (don't know what it returns), while V7 will generate an error if you try to select NULL into a host variable without indicator variable.
2. NUL-terminate all fixed-length character strings. This actually didn't affect us, as we use VARCHARs for character data storage. The host variable lengths have to be extended to accomodate this terminator.
3. Trap ORA-00100 return code (Row Not Found). For us this was not needed, as we also used the precompiler flag "MODE=ORACLE", which retains the ORA-01403 error code.

> One question in particular - I believed that stored procedures would
> most likely be upward compatible to Oracle 8, but I have been
> cautioned otherwise that they may need some re-work to convert up.

No answers here; we use embedded SQL for all statements.

-kdg Received on Tue Sep 29 1998 - 10:29:36 CDT