RE: Oracle as a back-end for MS Access?

From: Jonathan Lewis <Jonathan_at_jlcomp.demon.co.uk>
Date: 1995/10/19
Message-ID: <814129955snz_at_jlcomp.demon.co.uk>#1/1


In article <00001a1b+000036d4_at_msn.com> daveihle_at_msn.com "David Ihle" writes:

: I've had some success using an Oracle7 ODBC driver along with the
: MS-Access Jet engine to access an Oracle RDBMS. There are no serious
: bugs, but there are definitely performance issues (its rather
: difficult to measure the degradation).

I may be along way out of date by now, but about 3 years ago I was asked to look at an application that had been developed against Access, then had the back-end switched to an Oracle database on an HP9000.

The complaint was that screens that used to take 'only 3 seconds' to display were now taking 12 minutes. Locating the problem was simply: just switch the database into tracing (sql_trace = true) and see what the front-end was sending in.

There were two issues:
a) Jet seemed to be only capable of requesting one row at a time,

    so request for a simple screen full (20ish rows) could easily     results in several dozen messages being pushed across a busy     network.

b) The application had been built almost totally by drag and drop

    painting, and the really heavy hitting screen had a non-visible     intersection table that was used to validate the two displayed     tables. The default code generated by the screen painter had     consequently fetched all (18,000) primary keys from the table,     one at a time, then fetched all (18,000) rows from the table     based on primary key: resulting in thousands of messages getting     onto the network. When coded, rather than painted, the problem     disappeared.

Could anyone comment on whether the above are still likely to be issues with Jet/Access.

-- 
Jonathan Lewis
Received on Thu Oct 19 1995 - 00:00:00 CET

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