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Re: Connect ORACLE to WWW through CGI-Perl-Script

From: Paul Barton-Davis <pbd_at_op.net>
Date: 1996/12/18
Message-ID: <599604$c05@picasso.op.net>#1/1

Theodore Hope (thope_at_igc.org) wrote:
: Patrick Riley wrote:
: [ wants to connect to Oracle from Perl ]
 

: I suggest you check out OraPerl at
 

: http://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/perl/db/perl4/oraperl

I'd suggest you upgrade to Perl 5.0, and use the DB interface. Its the only sane way to use Perl and Oracle together if you actually expect a heavy load on your web server. To be honest, when I expect a heavy load on the web server, I'd forget about coupling Oracle and Perl together. Although the DB interface is implemented pretty well, there are several important relational database concepts that are hard to map into Perl's world (like NULL columns, for example). If you're dealing with datasets where every column is text or just a number and is always filled, then Perl works OK. oraperl is not very speedy, however.

As a sidenote, does it amaze anyone else that Oracle has completely failed to come up with a decent C interface to their server code ? OCI is functional, but hardly convenient. Its not very difficult to write a sscanf() like interface - I've done it twice, and I know at least one other person who has done the same. Given that internal Oracle developers do the same thing for themselves, how come Oracle has been so lame with their exported interface ?

And as a second sidenote, can I also comment on how unbelievable it is to me that Oracle chose PL/SQL as the language their web server uses for "extensions" ? This ADA/SQL monstrosity is admitted by the people who actually implemented it to be incredibly slow compared to native code, and SQL itself is so far from being even close to the kind of language I would want to use for Web work ... how much more useful their server would have been if they had added a reaonable API, and let you do run-time dynamic linking of object code into their server, like Netscape and Apache do. That allows you to write in the language of your choice, rather than a lame attempt at proceduralizing SQL.

Oh well, thankfully its not hard to extend Apache to provide the same kind of simple access to an Oracle database that OWS does.

--p

--
hybrid rather than pure; compromising rather than clean;    | Militant Agnostic
distorted rather than straightforward; ambiguous rather than| I Don't Know
articulated; both-and rather than either-or; the difficult  |   and You Don't
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Received on Wed Dec 18 1996 - 00:00:00 CST

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