Re: OCI and V7

In article <4118_at_unixhub.SLAC.Stanford.EDU> ian_at_jupiter.SLAC.Stanford.EDU (Ian A. MacGregor) writes:
>In article <1992Jun4.010823.22604_at_cognos.com>, nigelc_at_cognos.com (Nigel Campbell) writes:
>|> Simple question:
>|>
>|> Are there any migration issues for a system using OCI with
>|> V6 vs V7 ?
>|>
>
>There are a few. I'm not sure if they are associated with V7 or new version
>of OCI. The first is that a null value not handled through an indicator
>variable will cause the program to fail. I am not sure if this happens an
>run or compile time.

This is a general change in behavior, for both the OCIs and the precompilers. It's a runtime error.

>This to me is a good change. Improperly handled null values currently
>result in incorrect output.
> V7 has different
>datatypes. The old char is now varchar2 and can hold up to 2000 bytes.
> Char is similar except entries are stored blank padded.
> I am not sure what impact this
>has on OCI. Lastly there has been some talk of no longer supporting the "old"
>OCI call syntax.
>
> Ian MacGregor
> Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
> (415) 926-3528

CHAR is fully ANSI compatible, with a maximum length of 255. CHARs are not really stored blank-padded (that would be greatly inefficient), but they observe blank-padding semantics on input and output.

Don't know what you mean by not supporting the "old" OCI call syntax. The only things that have changed are that a few old HLI routines are no longer in the library. (The ones that people were warned about in the V6 manual.)

There are 5 new routines that support new V7 features, including OFLNG that allows you to fetch portions of a (2GB) LONG column.

The V7 OCIs are fully backward compatible with V6. You can choose linktime options to preserve V6 compatibility, or you can recode (slightly), and get the advantages of V7 (especially greatly reduced network traffic).

--Tim (tssmith_at_netcom.com) or (tssmith_at_oracle.com) Received on Thu Jun 04 1992 - 21:57:36 CEST