Re: Oracle sucks on NT, was Re: 8.5 OPINION

"P. Larsen" wrote:
>
> Hi

Hey,

> Memory leaks have been investigated several times, and the conclussion is
> that Oracle uses a deferred deallocation which confuses WinNT "experts" to
> think it leaks RAM.

Oh, so instead of memory "leaks", which are unintentional, Oracle is deliberately hogging and holding on to the memory. That really makes a difference when you're out of resources. Who investigated this and came to this conclusion anyway?

> My general problem with Windows is it's DLL concept. M$ fan or no M$ fan,
> you must admit that the design screams out for crashes. Each program uses at
> least 5 of them ... Oracle is a "little"more complex and uses about 30 I
> think.
> Some of those are shared with M$ files which again are shared with other
> application - the purpose of DLL files of course. But the files exist in
> different versions. You install a new program after Oracle, and they might
> overwrite the DLL files which Forms builder was certified with, with
> versions that just doesn't work. And Oracle has no control over this.

Agreed. I said NT was not immune from "DLL hell" at the beginning of this thread. A big chink in the armor of its supposed robustness.

> In my
> oppinion this concept is the cause of most crashes on Windows. And hence I
> have a problem with the guys who came up with the concept. They should have
> included some mechanisms to aviod this confussion and programmers should not
> abuse the DLL concept.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Microsofties wanted to share code to reduce program size and load modules only when needed for efficiency. But they didn't think about all how this should be managed and this anarchy is what we have today. Supposedly, in the near future, M$ will have their operating system itself install/uninstall and version control all programs and associated DLL's so it will all be done "correctly", eliminating the need for third party program installers and the mistakes they may cause.

Weren't they supposed to introduce that with NT5? Wonder if that's why it's being delayed for so long.

...
> I've used Forms and Reports to make very large and corporate targed
> applications. I've never been able to use VB for that.

What do you mean by "large, corporate targeted apps"? Forms and Reports that have to fetch thousands if not millions of rows? That would be hard to buffer and manage.

> Anyway, Forms can't
> be a ripoff of VB - after all Forms existed in the mid 80'ies (where I
> started using it).

Dang, forms in the mid 80's? And to think I scoffed at SQL*Forms 3 for being primitive. I don't think these early forms looked anything like VB, they weren't all that "visual". (Not that I remember what VB 1.0 looked like). It's probably around Forms 4.0 or 4.5 that Forms and VB started to converge in appearance and style.

> It is NOT a programming language - I give you that. It's meant to shorten
> the time you need to develop a system from scratch. VB tries to do this by
> providing objects and wizards which I have no problem with by the way.
>
> Oracle tools are - and I think that is logical - targeted against the Oracle
> Database. BUT - it is pretty easy to use Forms and Reports with other
> vendors databases.

Now maybe. Back in early Forms 4.x, you had to manually write SQL or other code for ON-INSERT, ON-UPDATE, ON-COMMIT triggers to handle the transactions that are automatically done with Oracle databases.

> However, I wouldn't buy Oracle's tools without having
> their database first (at least when we talk about Oracle Developer -
> Designer and Oracle Objects is another matter).

Didn't Designer require an Oracle DB as its repository? They relaxed that requirement too?  

> I'm running Oracle Designer and Developer daily and they never trash the
> system. I have IE4.0 hang the system daily though - but again I suspect
> these intermixing DLL files to be the cause of that - I'm trying my best to
> identify the DLL's that might be the "guilty party".

That sounds unusual from my perspective. Are you using NT or Win 95? I noticed installing Active Desktop w. IE4 will increase your chance of crashing your shell (explorer.exe), so I don't do it any more. Besides, my default browser is Netscape, another memory hog.  

> >While NT deserves blame for not being robust enough to completely
> >contain Oracle's memory hogging and leaking habits, that
> >does not exonerate Oracle from committing those sins in the first.
>
> Talk about memory hogging ... and OS that takes 32MB :) Nahh, this ain't
> "bash M$" so I'll refrain from further comments.

"We have to hog more memory in order to better manage it", as M$ might say. :)

Bash them all you want, I'm the resident M$ hater/basher at my office.

> Sleep tight :)

Don't let the Oracle bugs bite.  

--
Eugene