RE: Oracle and client/server in health insurance

Client/server is becoming a necessity. My impression is that the latest tools massacre database performance if you try to run them on terminals. So much functionality is being added that it is not practical to have it all on one processor any more.

Typical example: Hampshire County Council (England) have over a hundred users using terminals. They migrated from SQL*Forms v2.3 to v3 and are having terrible performance problems. Oracle have people there trying to do something about it, but the bottom line is they ought to go client/server.

You will see elsewhere in this newgroup complaints about the performance of CDE tools on PCs (i.e. Forms v4 etc). It rather looks as if you need a reasonably fast 486 to get the best performance out of them (note that the new tools are all Windows products, whereas previously it has all been character mode). But in the end, I think this is just life. Partly its that software houses design for the hardware they expect people to have and partly they design for the hardware people need to have if they are to achieve the functionality they want. Nowadays its all graphics and multimedia and that's hard work for the machine.

The upside is that if you don't like Oracle's tools, you can try somebody else's and see if they run faster, thanks to ODBC. Necessary checks to ensure data integrity can be programmed at RDBMS level in v7 so it doesn't matter so much if the tool you choose is a bit lacking in the validation department.

Tony Scott
(asc_at_cix.compulink.co.uk) Received on Sun Feb 13 1994 - 23:18:14 CET