Re: Which to Use - ProC or OCI ?

Mark Killick (informbook_at_zetnet.co.uk) wrote:

: The way forward has to be the use of PL/SQL packages. Now with v2.3 
: supporting tables of records and file access it is as useful as 
: Pro*C. It is totally portable along as the platform runs Oracle (if 
: it doesn't then what are you doing?) and a great plus is there are 

The poster of the question did actually mention:

> a database access API which will be used initially to access Oracle, but
> with the possibility that in the future another database could be used -
> either another RDBMS or a non-RDBMS database. All application programs

Oracle PL/SQL is not very portable when you are talking about non-Oracle databases.

Here's my 0.02 :

Pro*C and OCI are much of a muchness, some people prefer OCI for C++ applications. Both should give approx. the same performance.

Pro*C is easier to understand than OCI, so maintenence may be easier.

It may be an idea get some good people to write the layer that handles all the DB interaction and that accepts and returns normal 'C' structures/lists/ pointers. The advantage of this is that you get a few good people who know how to write well-tuned Pro*C/OCI/SQL code and allow the rest of your coders to just deal with normal structures.

One layer for each DB that you wish to access, maybe with a common interface, you should be set.

Pro*C is probably more portable than OCI - Oracle Pro*C bears a strong resemblence to some of the ESQL/C versions out there.

Also, when you are looking at code reuse make sure that you only use standard SQL wherever possible - Oracle has some functionality that isn't in the ANSI standard or in other vendor's implementations.

IAP Received on Thu Mar 27 1997 - 00:00:00 CET