Re: The Oracle ODBC driver story
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2010 13:59:23 +0000 (UTC)
Message-ID: <hutffr$djp$1_at_news.eternal-september.org>
On Fri, 11 Jun 2010 06:19:27 -0700, John Hurley wrote:
> So you are talking about making ODBC calls from a linux machine? What
> kind of software does that exactly?
>
> Sorry to be dense here but all the significant development efforts I
> have seen over the last 10 years using the Oracle plumbing ( SQLNet
> whatever you want to call it ) stack and/or OCI stuff ... I kind of
> thought at this point the whole ODBC thing is a dying and/or outmoded
> set of technology.
There are many pieces of software that use ODBC. Microsoft tried killing it, in favor of ADO, but ODBC is still alive and well, even kicking a**. That sort of debate would be off topic here.
>
> As far as "complaining several times" did you submit an SR and
> especially an SR with some kind of test case that demonstrates a
> repeatable failure?
To be very short: yes, I have. No resolution. The failure was acknowledged, but never resolved. Had you taken the time to read my post, you would have noticed a link to the Red Hat bug repository in which they do acknowledge the bug but essentially say "go ask oracle why are they shipping an incompatible driver". That is a verifiable fact. This is precisely what I am doing: asking here why is Oracle shipping an unusable driver?
The course of events that lead me to this is the following: I am looking into an open source reporting engine called RLIB. This engine, as is the case with many open source products, has the native links toward MySQL and Postgres and uses ODBC links for all proprietary databases that they cannot distribute themselves. Oracle, obviously, belongs to the latter category. RLIB is an engine that can produce PDF and HTML reports, running in batch. It manages pages, groups, headers, footers and all of the other stuff that report engines do. It has Perl bindings, so it's easy for me to write scripts that will be executed by cron and produce a lot of pretty reports asked for by my management. RLIB doesn't have a native Oracle connection, it requires ODBC. I wasted my entire evening linking and configuring something that should have been packaged. The product is described here: http://rlib.sicompos.com See if you're smarter than me and can configure it to use Oracle without ODBC.
-- http://mgogala.byethost5.comReceived on Fri Jun 11 2010 - 08:59:23 CDT