Re: boolean types and portability

damorgan <damorgan_at_exesolutions.com> wrote in message news:<3C9BCDAF.687DF3CC_at_exesolutions.com>...

> Why would anyone developing in Oracle give a flaming donut
> about a data type in PostgresSQL.

Because I like to develop in PostgreSQL and deploy my applications to Oracle. For starters the command line interface that comes with PostgreSQL is much better than the standard sqlplus interface and second PostgreSQL takes much less time to download and comes preinstalled on Red Hat Linux 7.2. Third I like my applications to be as database independent as possible so that users may be able to choose their own server to the extent that is possible. Things like JDBC which were designed so that applications which changed database servers could run with no changes to the source code, so long as the database servers support standard SQL. Otherwise not at all neat code has to be embedded in source code to detect the driver being used and take different actions accordingly in much the same way that web code has to check for netscape vs. internet explorer to check whether or not a certain Javascript feature is supported. It would be nice if all database servers adopted at least all standard SQL data types as a minimum. This would take very little work on behalf of vendors.

Neil Received on Sat Mar 30 2002 - 14:07:32 CST