Re: Sybase vs Oracle - which is better?

After a gap of 8 years I recently had the misfortune to need to use Oracle for a while. It has come a long way with its performance, stored procs, triggers, PL/SQL in the server, etc. However, I noticed the following important facilities were still missing:

1. Cannot do a DELETE with a join or correlated sub-query.
2. No Sybase style temporary tables.
3. Cannot easily create and use a table in a stored procedure, temporary or not.
4. you cannot write a stored proc to return result rows (yes, I know you can return a REFCURSOR, but that is nowhere near as useful).

I believe that 1-3 above are the reason why so much Oracle code requires cursors. Problem 4 results in a lot more SQL being embedded in applications, rather than in stored procedures, which makes tuning harder.

> + PL/SQL is more powerful than TRANSACT/SQL
No it isn't, it is just different (see above shortcomings) - stored functions are useful though, but Java in the db looks much better. T-SQL seems simpler to me, but maybe that is just familiarity.

> + Row level locking been for years in Oracle, only recently in
> Sybase.

I can honestly say I have not found the lack of row-level locking to be a problem. I suspect that this is more of an issue if an application has been designed for Oracle, then ported. On the rare occasions I have needed this, I have just padded the row so each fits on a single page. Received on Mon Nov 23 1998 - 00:00:00 CST