Re: PL/SQL vs. (Embedded SQL & 3GL) performance comparison

klm_at_atlanta.dg.com writes in article <1993Sep22.131602.11522_at_beau.atlanta.dg.com>:
>
> Hello fellow Oracle-ites,
>
> We're in the early stages of a large application development project.
> The primary development tools will be Forms 4.0 and Reports 2.0.
> We expect a good bit of the application to be written in some sort
> of procedural code. We've heard rumors that the performance of
> PL/SQL can be *much* slower than imbedded SQL in a 3GL such as
> COBOL or C. Does anybody have a feel for the performance differences
> between PL/SQL and embedded SQL?
>
>

This is correct. But you simply have to know how it works to go around the problem :-)

With a 3GL program, you _compile_ your program (and you preprocess the SQL statements). In PL/SQL, there is no compiler; the SQL-statements are processed every time such a script is run.

The units which are processed, however, are not the single SQL statements; instead they are PL/SQL blocks which are complete coding sequences (including loops, if then else, SQL-statements, cursors and so on). These blocks can go up to 32K coding size.

A few years ago, one of my co-workers developed a PL-SQL program which runs the whole day in the background. It was much faster to develop, more easier to test and runs faster than a similar 3GL program.

Willy

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