Re: Setting bind variables or defines from applications?

From: Volker Hetzer <volker.hetzer_at_ieee.org>
Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2006 19:07:58 +0200
Message-ID: <e2dntj$oda$1@nntp.fujitsu-siemens.com>

Jim Kennedy schrieb:
> "Volker Hetzer" <volker.hetzer_at_ieee.org> wrote in message
> news:e2d9ne$6t1$1_at_nntp.fujitsu-siemens.com...

>> Sybrand Bakker schrieb:
>>> On 21 Apr 2006 09:06:53 -0700, "dean" <deanbrown3d_at_yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> You're a (seemingly very good) dba, but clearly not a developer.
>>> You don't know me. I have more than a decade of development experience
>>> on my sleeves.
>> Just out of curiosity, what did you and when was it?
>> You really don't sound like a guy who is programming for
>> customers talking to him. Are you in the aircraft industry or so?
>>
>> Me, I've also got a decade of developing but we use oracle as a better
>> access database and anything that takes less than one second is fine
>> by my customers. All ten of them. And hard parses aren't a problem at
>> all.
>>
>>> Unlike developers like you, who only know how to click
>>> a button
>> Like one of those people oracle develeoped htmldb for?
>>
>>> and make a mess of it.
>> A mess is when customers complain.
>>
>> Lots of Greetings!
>> Volker

>
> I have well over a decade of developer experience and hard parses are a
> problem unless your application minimally uses the database. (eg few users,
> or few queries) For example, one large software project I worked on had an
> engineering group that thought they new better. They decided that "it was
> too much trouble to use bind variables, that it wasn't important." So the
> applcation went out to customers. When their code ran it bought the database
> to its needs. It was so bad that the other people on the system couldn't do
> any work.
>
> We looked at what they were doing. We benchmarked it. Their code was
> importing data from external systems.

Well, *obviously* a mass insert would have to use bind variables, and arrays at that. I don't think anyone disputes that.

For me, it depends on the API. For a gui implementation I often use tcl/tk and there binds are (were?) a bit of trouble if the database used unicode. So, for gui intensive stuff (user types in stuff, result is one select with typically less than ten rows of data) I'm not recoding the whole app in another programming language with a worse gui.

For mass inserts like batch stuff overnight we decided against tcl precisely for the bind variable issue.

I mean, sqlplus allows no-bind-variable stuff too and if the usage pattern doesn't diverge significantly from that I have no problem with literals.

> So if Agile programming eschews best practices I am against it.
It doesn't. However, it *does* involve prototyping practices and testing. So, if those guys didn't test under realistic load conditions it has nothing to do with the methodology.

> Maybe you
> only worked on small trivial applications, I don't know,
Most of the time. The only big one (data-wise) is a spatial one where I use sql*loader to get the data into the database.

Lots of Greetings!
Volker Received on Sat Apr 22 2006 - 12:07:58 CDT