Re: Sybase vs Oracle: Temp Tables

Will this feature available in the coming announced oracle 8.1?

Paul Moore (paul.moore_at_uk.origin-it.com) wrote:
: In article <35D86C7A.5071_at_ictgroup.com>, jgitomer_at_ictgroup.com says...
: > Hi Barry,
: >
: > Maybe I have been brainwashed by Oracle, but I don't see the need for a
: > temporary table. Other than not having to explicitly create and drop a
: > table what does it buy me to have temporary tables?
: >
: The basic problems I have found are
:
: a) create table is DDL and so imposes an implicit commit
: b) you need to use DBMS_SQL to issue a create table in PL/SQL
: c) you need the explicit drop - in SQL Server (where I have seen
: temporary tables previously) the temporary table is automatically
: dropped at end of session.
:
: Temporary tables are very useful as far as I can see for general data
: manipulation work - the SELECT statement is so powerful, it's a shame not
: to use it as much as possible.
:
: My particular use was with a data load application. Data is dumped into
: input tables on the database. From there, PL/SQL procedures are run which
: scan and validate the data, categorise it, and load it into the main
: database. I'm doing a lot of procedural work on subsets of the data,
: which would be easier (and probably more efficient) if I could subset the
: data to temporary tables prior to validation/loading/logging. Point (a)
: above here is important, as I want to rollback the whole load process if
: too many validation errors occur - so I can't do DDL mid-stream.
:
: In this particular case, I have to leave the "temporary" tables
: permanently defined (and hence I have to maintain the column definitions,
: etc etc) and simply load/empty them during a load run. This also has
: concurrency implications, as I can't have two runs using the tables at
: once (whereas "true" temporary tables are per-session, and so are
: independent...)
:
: In summary, for a certain class of work (and a certain way of developing
: applications, I guess) temporary tables would be a very useful feature. I
: too would like to have them in Oracle.
:
: Temporary tables, and stored procedures/functions which are capable of
: returning resultsets via an ODBC driver (the latter is rumoured to be
: coming in 8.0.5), are the two features which I really miss from SQL
: Server when I'm using Oracle (and both are causing stumbling blocks in a
: conversion project I'm invlved in...)
:
: Paul Moore.
:
Received on Thu Aug 20 1998 - 00:00:00 CDT