Re: newbie queston: why would anyone use Oracle?

"Mladen Gogala" <gogala_at_sbcglobal.net> wrote in message news:pan.2005.09.22.11.52.19.914999_at_sbcglobal.net...
> Actually, you were taught wrong, whoever might have been teaching you.
> There are situations in which you want to implement simple procedural
> logic: if the customer doesn't have enough money on the account, abort
> transaction. Log the attempt in the activity table.
> It is a short "if-then" logic which can be masked with complex data
> types, for no apparent benefit. Furthermore, there is one crucial problem
> with the OO stuff: interoperability. Classes are types and the logic is
> hidden ("encapsulated") in the class definitions. Relational databases,
> like 3GL languages, have very simple type structure: NUMBER, DATE,
> CHAR, and VARCHAR2. That's it. It was designed for portability. As soon
> as you introduce variable types, databases stop inter-operating.
> Purist OO solutions are a religious practice, not a practical programming
> methodology. In the real world, one needs simple 3GL things to do simple
> things in a simple way. That is PL/SQL, simplicity itself.

The original statement that I was commenting on was:

"An extremely powerful procedural language"

Doing "simple things in a simple way" does not require "extremely powerful"; my comment was to be taken to the effect that I would not use the more "powerful" procedural features, whatever they may be, because they are probably not simple deviations from the relational model.

Paul Received on Thu Sep 22 2005 - 10:24:28 CDT