Re: ANSI SQL COMPATIBILITY

From: Tim Romano <tim_at_ot.com>
Date: 1998/11/12
Message-ID: <364B02EC.75EAB563@ot.com>#1/1

Oracle's ODBC driver (2.5.0103 with patch) is not intelligent enough to do this, and Oracle Support says that the ODBC driver for Oracle 8 as well supports only inner joins ("Oracle's ODBC driver 8.0.X only support [sic] inner joins" -- excerpt from an email from Oracle support, dated 11/10/98).

These are such egregious shortcomings in an ODBC driver that I interpret them as intentional: an attempt to discourage development with and use of desktop applications that rely upon ODBC. Not that Microsoft doesn't resort to similar tactics. But independent software developers and customers get caught in the cross-fire.

We standardized on Oracle and use Objects for OLE with Visual Basic. There are times when one wants to use a slick third-party VB add-on (e.g. for reports) that does not support oo4o, and so one has no recourse but to use ODBC via RDO or OLEDB(ADO), or to subtract the "R" from RAD and work in "unbound" mode.

Tim Romano

Neil Pike wrote regarding join syntax and multi-vendor compatibility:

> [...]

> You'll either have to use the lowest common denominator query, or try coding everything via ODBC and hope that
> each vendor's odbc driver is intelligent enough to use their own extensions. [...]
Received on Thu Nov 12 1998 - 00:00:00 CST