Packages and Efficiency

Richard,

I am finally getting around to writing back to you, but it is probably too late for your purposes.

My tests showed that packages used in
Uniface actually SLOWED DOWN performance significantly.

Keep in mind, that this was working with Uniface on the front end, and Oracle on the server. I don't know what would happen in pure Oracle. The test was to just read records from the server, into a Uniface entity, on the client.

Up to 5,000 records, no major difference. But beyond that, no packages was clearly in the lead, by either 1000s of records, or minutes of time.

I assume that the inefficiency is because Uniface looks for the Physical address when reading a record with the package. Also, Oracle must do all its regular checks, as well as fire the package code. The packages Uniface generates for simple reads are actually quite complicated.

I hope that this is valuable to you.
These tests actually turned out to be very expensive in the end. While doing the tests, I had to shut down the down the machine. The machine subsequently wouldn't work, and I spent weeks debugging and fixing it. (It made for an extremely slow performance time. ;-) ) It turned out to be a bad hard drive in the end. It could have been just coincidence, but I don't think so.

If you ever do tests on packages in pure Oracle, do write with your results.

Rodger Lepinsky
ADP Systems Partnership
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Richard Bolz wrote:
>
> This is in response to your posting to comp.databases.oracle.tools: I
> have similar questions and have gotten no response.
>
> I'm fairly new to the PL/SQL world but have extensive experience in Ada,
> the language on which PL/SQL is based. In Ada, there is no evidence of
> a performance 'hit' when using packages.
>
> I work as a consultant to the US Air Force and on my current project I
> am dealing with a small contracting firm. They are hesitant to use
> packages because they 'fear' there might be performance problems. I am
> trying to convince them that the use of packages is a superb design-time
> aid that carries over into actual coding.
>
> Sorry that this is so little help. If you get any answers (apart from
> the newsgroup) please pass them on.
>
> Dick Bolz
  Received on Thu May 01 1997 - 00:00:00 CEST