Re: newbie queston: why would anyone use Oracle?

From: David Portas <REMOVE_BEFORE_REPLYING_dportas_at_acm.org>
Date: 22 Sep 2005 09:02:23 -0700
Message-ID: <1127404943.364046.12770@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com>

Mladen Gogala wrote:
> 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.

I can't let that go unchallenged. RDBMSs are not in principle or in fact restricted in the number of types they support. "SQL92 has a very simple set of types" would have been a more supportable statement. But then you say "It was designed for portability" straight after referring to two types ("NUMBER" and "VARCHAR2") that are proprietary to Oracle and not part of standard SQL at all.

David Portas Received on Thu Sep 22 2005 - 11:02:23 CDT