Re: Oracle and Lotus Notes

In article <33559C9A.73AE_at_clearsol.com.au>, Glen <glenwigg_at_clearsol.com.au> writes:
>
>My client is exploring the alternatives for internal coms including
>workflow, mail and database access for data entry and retrieval. They
>are keen on Lotus Notes because of the first two but the information is
>a bit thin on the third.
>

I am currently supporting a project that is using Lotus Notes as a front end, an Oracle database as the backend, and Lotus Notes Pump as the transfer mechanism. I do NOT recommend this process for anything more that a trivial system.

>Does anyone have any experience with accessing Oracle data from Notes.
>Lotus are promoting their data pump as an alternative to ODBC but it
>appears to be suitable only for batch loading of data into the Notes

This is definitely true. Pump cannot be used for interactive transactions. We save all of our transactions in a Notes view or Oracle table and transfer them at a scheduled time once a day for each type of transactions.

>database. ODBC is said to be too slow. I am inclined to look at OO4O
>but can't justify the time for testing at this stage.
>
>Alternatively, using JDBC or a web cartridge through Notes as a web
>browser would be an option.
>
>Any performance comments please.
>
>Glen wigg
>glenwigg_at_clearsol.com.au

I am on the Oracle side but it seems as if the pump software needs a lot of hand holding to keep it operating properly. I have never been involved with an application using OBDC so I can't comment much on it.

We are using version 1 of Pump and it has some severe bugs/limitations that took us a lot of time to resolve. I believe some of these still exist in version 2 but am not sure. We thought that we were only doing simple things but we were constantly getting the response from Lotus support of "We never thought of someone wanting to do that."

One of the major limitations is the lack of multiple statement support in one transaction. (You can have dependent tasks but this is not the same thing) This makes it virtually impossible to interact directly with a relational database. I actually had my Notes developer tell me to completely re-design my database (de-normalize all of my tables into one flat structure!) since Notes couldn't handle talking to more than one table at a time. My reaction was not plesant. Anyway the only way we could find to deal with this was to have intermediate tables between Notes and Oracle and I had to write programs to do all of the real work that should have been done by the transfer process.

Shari Dishop dishop_at_netops.md.essd.northgrum.com Network Engineering
Northrop Grumman Corporation - Electronic Sensors and Systems Division Received on Fri Apr 18 1997 - 00:00:00 CEST