IDENTITY property (MS SQL Server code port)

Our company is considering porting our existing application (an _Extremely_ large wharehouse automation system) from MS SQL Server to Oracle 7.3 for Windows NT.

We have had quite a few things that made us uneasy about this port, including a copious ammount of GPFs and general goofiness with the oracle products. (I had my first 4 access violations from the oracle tools before I even got the instance running)

We have just hit another brick wall: Porting columns with the IDENTITY property.

The Identity property is a MS declarative constraint that makes the specified column automaticly take the next available value. This was too tempting to resist using for many of our primary keys. We have perhaps 200 tables with the identity property on their primary keys, and multiples of that number of points in our code where we are inserting into those tables (and therefore not specifying a primary key).

Our problem is that we cannot find an equivolent functionality with Oracle 7.3 Workgroup Server.

I understand that I could write about 200 Before Triggers to furnish these values, but this seems like an option of last resort, due to the size and tediousness of the task, as well as concerns about the efficiency of such a solution.

If any of the Oracle gurus out there could give me any advice.

Specifically, my questions are these:

1. Are we stupid for migrating to Oracle Server? Is the port to NT just too recent for the platform to be stable?
2. Is there a better solution to our problem with the Identity columns?
3. Can anyone recomend a good book on Oracle specific to both NT, and version 7.3+ (since version 7.2 was _markedly_ different)
4. Is there anyone out there who has done this migration in the past? If so, what advantages/disadvantages can we expect?
5. What other gotchas are out there awaiting us? (and is there anything we can do to get around them)
6. What is with the HTML online help???? Links that go nowhere, or to the wrong place, are common. The JAVA search utility is both ineffective and buggy. HUGE pages (like the one with all the commands on it, and about 60+% of the links to the individual commands don't work... now _that's_ helpful) When can we expect help that's more helpful? (yeah, I know... spoiled windows developer, that's me! :o)

Any help would be very much appreciated. We will be making our decision about oracle migration (to be or not to be) within the next few weeks.

Thanks a bunch! Received on Tue Jun 10 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT