Re: Oracle #1? Then why are these still missing...

Mark Styles wrote:

[ nonsense about monkey butlers snipped ;) ]

>>>What about if you're using it for debug? Personally I use DBMS_PIPE
>>>for debugging, but some people use DBMS_OUTPUT, and like to be able to
>>>turn it on only when they need to debug.
>>
>>Then the default behaviour should be to display the output unless told
>>otherwise.
>
>Why? So that a whole bunch of system maintainers get pissed off
>because suddenly their system is doing the reverse of what it's
>supposed to do?

Sometimes you just have to break backwards-compatibility. It pisses folk off, but nothing stays the same forever. Bad decisions, made in the past, sometimes have to be radically corrected. Or, you could do things the MS way and build layer upon layer upon layer of performance killing, compatibility preserving, nonsense just so some geriatric old tosser can still run dBase v1.0. But this particular example is only a minor niggle.

Anyway, name one other language that doesn't print when you tell it to?

>>>PL/SQL isn't designed for file and print handling. Oracle have
>>>supplied some packages to give us some outside of the DB
>>>functionality, but fundamentally PL/SQL is designed to manipulate data
>>>in a relational database.
>>
>>Yeah, but no man is an island. The database exists in an environment
>>where data has to be collated from a vast number of different sources,
>>and it has to be distributed to a wide variety of destinations.
>
>But the environment is *open*. The biggest part of open systems is the
>interoperability between products. A single product doesn't have to be
>able to do everything, as long as it can interface with other
>products. The developer can choose which products suit their needs.

And the primary, and most important, interface it must maintain is with the OS it executes under. If a product has poor file handling capabilities through the OS, then the interface to the OS is incomplete. I understand fully that Oracle has to abstract its interface to deal with heterogeneous deployment, but the lowest common denominator bullshit that they have implemented is painful and weak.

Gary
--
Gary O'Keefe
gary_at_onegoodidea.com

You know the score - my current employer has nothing to do with what I post Received on Thu Jul 29 1999 - 07:40:58 CDT