Re: Advise needed: Can I use/learn Oracle quickly?

"Paul" <paul_at_not.a.chance.ie> wrote in message news:MPG.1aa42b9045084d089898d6_at_news1.eircom.net...
> Absolutely not. I appreciate that Oracle is in itself a vast and
> sophisticated technology which is normally in the cutting edge range of
> db technology.
>
> I looked up the list of features that you provided, and yes, it is true
> that Interbase/Firebird doesn't provide them (I couldn't find utl_file
> or utl_smtp in Oracle Essentials or Effective Oracle by Design).

The most likely reason for the omission of UTL_FILE and UTL_SMTP in the second of these 2 books is that Tom covered them in his earlier book :(. To be fair both are covered in the supplied packages manual, which may not be the first thing many people look at, but if one is trying to get to grips with Oracle it is handy to find out what we don't have to reinvent

> However, with respect, these features are not necessary for many
> applications, and are overkill for many small to medium organisations.

I'm not sure I'd entirely agree, the ability to write logs from stored procedures for debugging purposes, the ability to send email from the database for example to alert administrators or application owners, these are the sorts of things that a lot of people find very useful.

Other stuff that the developer probably doesn't need to reinvent with Oracle

queuing
job scheduling
auditing
row-level rather than object level security text encoding
workflow

-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
Audit Commission UK