Re: Sybase vs Oracle - which is better?

THIS is EXACTLY why cursors are "bad" -- they allow kludgy programming such as you describe here. There are far better ways of reducing a large set of data to one of more exact interest (no one on this planet needs to scroll through 50,000 records in one sitting, please...).

One last comment, if you give a user 30 records he is not interested in OF COURSE he'll want to scroll some more. The trick is to provide enough search/drill down tools on the front end to narrow the search.

What you described is like "I don't know what the user wants -- and the user doesn't really know what they want -- so let's give them ALL the records so they can scroll through until they find the right one". Give me a break.

Barbara Kennedy wrote:
>
> I am not sure why you believe that cursors are "bad". Not sure what is
> "bad" about them. If I have a GUI that needs to display a long list but the
> user may not navigate the entire list why would I want to bring over the
> entire list - generates a lot of network traffic, takes a lot of room up on
> the client - RAM, generates a lot of disk i/o on the server. With a cursor
> I can get the first 20 or 30 and if the user wants to see more I can
> retrieve the next 20 or 30. There are situations where bringing entire
> results sets over in one fell swoop would be suboptimal and inefficient; not
> all cases of course.
> Jim
>
> kennedyleigh_at_yahoo.com wrote in message <72rn7e$fpb$1_at_nnrp1.dejanews.com>...
> >
> >
> >> When it comes to benchmarks, the www.sybase.com site says that Sybase
> >> holds the world record, but www.oracle.com says it holds the record. I
> >> see in www.tpc.org that the fastest tpc is with Oracle!
> >
> >This is because benchmarking is quite an expensive exercise, so both
 vendors
> >only put out new figures every few months. Why ever has the newest figures
> >usually is the fastest !
> >
> >> I like Oracle as I've used it the most, heres why.
> >> + sqlplus is superior than isql, at least I can check return error
> >> codes.
> >
> >You can check error codes in isql as well.
> >
> >> + PL/SQL is more powerful than TRANSACT/SQL
> >
> >True - I'll give you that.
> >
> >> + I can see qll SQL activity for a particular session (SQLAREA),
> >> can't do it in Sybase?
> >
> >I don't exactly know what you mean as I don't know oracle that well, but
 you
> >can query the system tables or run several stored procedures to find out
 what
> >is happening.
> >
> >> + Oracle comes standard with many utilities, whereas Sybase doesn't
> >
> >It doesn't have anymore functionality though - sybase far fewer, more
 powerful
> >toos (ie: Sybase Central).
> >
> >> + Oracle has more options with triggers than Sybase. e.g. per row
> >
> >True.
> >
> >> + Monitors are standard with Oracle. (Sybase dont think so)
> >
> >Sybase comes with a monitor server and a historical monitor server which
 are
> >very powerful.
> >
> >> + Row level locking been for years in Oracle, only recently in
> >> Sybase.
> >
> >True, but only badly written apprications (ie: cursors) need row level
 locking
> >anyway.
> >
> >
> >> + Oracle can select data from another database on another server
> >> (dblink) Can Sybase?
> >
> >Oracle cannot support more that one database in a server, where as Sybase
 can
> >support more that you would ever need. It also supports the ability to
> >select from another database, and that database doesn't have to be a Sybase
> >database !
> >
> >
> >Oracle does have some good points, but it also has some very weak ones. I
> >would say that the killer function oracle has, which sybase doesn't is the
> >parrallel server. If you need to run a single server over multiple
 machines,
> >oracle is a better choice. If not, sybase is problably more suitable to
 most
> >people.
> >
> >The main reason Oracle does so well is that many Packages (eg: SAP,
> >Peoplesoft) are badly written cobol apps which use cursors for everything.
> >Sybase had a religous was with SAP over row level locking and oracle got
 very
> >rich because of it.
> >
> >Cheers,
> >LK.
> >
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Received on Fri Nov 20 1998 - 00:00:00 CST