Pro*C and OCI

I'm curious to why Oracle Corp. only includes OCI with Developer 2000 and Personal Oracle. Is OCI Oracle's preferred method of accessing Oracle databases from applications written in C. All the books on the subject I've read so far suggest that Pro*C is the better choice.

I know that OCI has a learning curve and only requires you to link in a specific dll to compile your kprograms. Pro*C requires an extra step in the form of pre-compiling the code then compiling the pre-process code to and executable, but it is easier to program from my standpoint. By using make files, this extra step literally goes un-notice when I compile my programs.

I'm I missing something or losing out on something by not using OCI?

I'm moving toward writing windows based programs in C or C++ to access Oracle 7 databases. I would like to continue using Pro*C. Is there a Pro*C compiler for windows? I would like to think that the same Pro*C pre-compiler that works for dos based source files should work for windows based source files as well, since the pre-compiler only looks for EXEC SQL statements in code when making changes.

Any input is appreciated...

Gerald Caldwell Jr. Received on Sun Oct 13 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST